The CubeSat’s navigation and control software was developed in SPARK/Ada using AdaCore’s GNAT Programming Studio (GPS) IDE and GNAT Pro compiler and exploiting Altran’s SPARK toolset to prove the absence of run-time errors. The software was developed at Vermont Technical College by a team of undergraduate students under the direction of Dr. Peter Chapin. Although they had no previous knowledge of SPARK or Ada, the students came up to speed quickly and were able to take advantage of SPARK’s various annotations to produce robust code.
“We specifically chose to write the control program for our CubeSat in SPARK because it offers increased reliability over the C language software used in almost all CubeSats to date,” said Prof. Carl Brandon, the project leader from Vermont Technical College. “The success of the fairly complicated software on this ELaNa CubeSat gives us confidence in using SPARK 2014 for the much more complicated and expensive lunar mission.”
“We are delighted to see our technologies once again being launched into space,” said Robert Dewar, AdaCore President. “You only get one shot for this kind of application, so it is critical to produce safe and totally reliable software. In this case, it is very encouraging to see students without prior experience using SPARK and GNAT Pro together to achieve this goal.”
For more information, please visit http://www.cubesatlab.org.
About AdaCore
Founded in 1994, AdaCore is the leading provider of commercial software solutions for Ada, a state-of-the-art programming language designed for large, long-lived applications where safety, security, and reliability are critical. AdaCore’s flagship product is the open source GNAT Pro development environment, which comes with expert on-line support and is available on more platforms than any other Ada technology. AdaCore has an extensive world-wide customer base; see http://www.adacore.com/home/company/customers/ for further information.
Ada and GNAT Pro see a growing usage in high-integrity and safety-certified applications, including space-based systems, commercial aircraft avionics, military systems, air traffic management/control, railroad systems, and medical devices, and in security-sensitive domains, such as financial services. The SPARK Pro toolset, available from AdaCore, is especially useful in such contexts.
AdaCore has North American headquarters in New York and European headquarters in Paris.
About Altran
Altran is a global leader in innovation and high-tech engineering consulting. The company is a trusted innovation and engineering partner of UK businesses throughout the automotive, aerospace, defence, energy, life sciences, rail and telecoms sectors. Its mission is to enable organisations to develop, deploy and integrate leading-edge systems, products and services. In the UK, Altran’s offices are located in Bath, Bristol, London, Loughborough, Manchester, Slough and Warwick. The Altran Group has 500 major clients and a global network of 20,000 employees, operating in over 20 countries.
