Kevin Barltrop

California Institute of Technology | CIT

Without rigorous system verification and validation (SVV), flight systems have no assurances that they will actually accomplish their objectives (e.g., the right system was built) or that the system was built to specification (e.g., the system was built correctly). As system complexity grows, exhaustive SVV becomes time and cost prohibitive as the...

Most complex systems nowadays heavily rely on software, and spacecraft and satellite systems are no exception. Moreover as systems capabilities increase, the corresponding software required to integrate and address system tasks becomes more complex. Hence, in order to guarantee a system's success, testing of the software becomes imperative. Traditi...

Verification and validation testing of autonomous spacecraft routinely culminates in the exploration of anomalous or faulted mission-like scenarios. Prioritizing which scenarios to develop usually comes down to focusing on the most vulnerable areas and ensuring the best return on investment of test time. Rules-of-thumb strategies often come into pl...

For the deep impact project, a myriad of fault protection (FP) monitors, symptoms, alarms and responses is engineered into the spacecraft FP software, common and yet custom to the flyby and impactor mother-daughter spacecraft. Device faults and functional faults are monitored, which are mapped 1-to-n into FP symptoms, per instance of the fault. Sym...