Towards the Formal Verification of the functional architecture of Autonomous Satellite Onboard Flight Software

The AGATA project, jointly conducted by CNES and ONERA, investigates the possibility of advanced autonomy for spacecraft. The flight software (FS) is a key component of such an autonomous spacecraft. We are currently investigating the use of the high level synchronous langage Esterel to design the reactive part of the FS. The choice of such a semantically well-defined language has many advantages. One of those is to open the verification process to formal methods. This article reports the effective use of a formal method and tool to verify some typical properties on the preliminary version of the FS for an autonomous observing satellite.