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Applying Innovative Software Processes to the Hubble Space Telescope Repair

2010 Chairman's Award of Excellence Recipient

The Hubble Space Telescope has been transmitting fantastic images of the cosmos for more than 10 years. But in January 2007 its flagship camera, the Advanced Camera for Surveys, suffered a power failure. CSC team members of the HST Payload Flight Software Team, included I-Ming (Annie) Chien, Dennis Garland, Michael Kelly and Wendy Lindboe. They were key contributors to the design, development and testing of the flight software needed for the repair. This was the first on-orbit board-level repair by a NASA crew, successfully performed in May 2009.

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The camera repair was added to the already planned Service Mission 4 scheduled to launch in May 2009. To meet the mission deadlines, the CSC team based at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center designed, developed and tested the software in eight months, a dramatically compressed schedule with no room for error. Further, two new instruments being installed as part of SM4 had been designed to complement the camera, elevating the need for a flawless repair.

Our team applied well-established software processes to what was originally viewed as a hardware problem. They modified the processes and changed from the traditional waterfall model that historically has been used for flight software to a rapid prototyping approach.

A major part of the repair involved interfacing the camera to a new application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC). The work also involved the integration and testing of field programmable gate array technology. These technologies represent an innovative advance in space flight hardware because they can replace custom hardware with software, which is much faster and less expensive to create.

The CSC team treated the ASIC as a flight software change in order to verify its compliance with proven space flight system integration processes used at Goddard. This shortened the system integration effort significantly while ensuring quality.

As a result of the combined efforts of the CSC team, the mission crew, and the scientists and engineers at the Space Telescope Science Institute and Goddard, Hubble’s main camera is now able to provide more than 80 percent of the scientific observations for which it was designed.