The Mars Science Laboratory developed the Workstation TestSet (WSTS) is a computer program that enables flight software development on virtual MSL avionics. The WSTS is the non-real-time flight avionics simulator that is designed to be completely software-based and run on a workstation class Linux PC. This provides flight software developers with their own virtual avionics testbed and allows device-level and functional software testing. The WSTS has successfully off-loaded many flight software development activities from the project testbeds. Flight software developers can now instantiate as many virtual testbeds as there are available computer resources and also enables device level fault injections that are difficult to achieve on real avionics testbeds.

The WSTS provides peripheral component interface (PCI)-card-level simulation of avionics hardware, enabling testing of all but the lowest layers of the flight software. The WSTS utilizes shared-memory and synchronization provisions of POSIX in a Linux environment to provide high-resolution simulation with synchronization of the interaction between simulation and the flight software.

This program was written by David A. Henriquez, Timothy K. Canham, Johnny T. Chang, and Nathaniel J. Villaume of Caltech for NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

This software is available for commercial licensing. Please contact Karina Edmonds of the California Institute of Technology at (626) 395-2322. Refer to NPO-45690.