A new innovative satellite mission, the Innovative CubeSat for Education (InnoCube), is addressed. The goal of the mission is to demonstrate “the wireless satellite”, which replaces the data harness by robust, high-speed, real-time, very short-range radio communications using the SKITH (SKIpTheHarness) technology. This will make InnoCube the first wireless satellite in history. Another technology demonstration is an experimental energy-storing satellite structure that was developed in the previous Wall#E project and might replace conventional battery technology in the future. As a further payload, the hardware for the concept of a software-based solution for receiving signals from Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) will be developed to enable precise position determination of the CubeSat. Aside from technical goals this work aims to be of use in the teaching of engineering skills and practical sustainable education of students, important technical and scientific publications, and the increase of university skills. This article gives an overview of the overall design of the InnoCube.

System relevant embedded software needs to be reliable and, therefore, well tested, especially for aerospace systems. A common technique to verify programs is the analysis of their abstract syntax tree (AST). Tree structures can be elegantly analyzed with the logic programming language Prolog. Moreover, Prolog offers further advantages for a thorough analysis: On the one hand, it natively provides versatile options to efficiently process tree or graph data structures. On the other hand, Prolog's non-determinism and backtracking eases tests of different variations of the program flow without big effort. A rule-based approach with Prolog allows to characterize the verification goals in a concise and declarative way. In this paper, we describe our approach to verify the source code of a flash file system with the help of Prolog. The flash file system is written in C++ and has been developed particularly for the use in satellites. We transform a given abstract syntax tree of C++ source code into Prolog facts and derive the call graph and the execution sequence (tree), which then are further tested against verification goals. The different program flow branching due to control structures is derived by backtracking as subtrees of the full execution sequence. Finally, these subtrees are verified in Prolog. We illustrate our approach with a case study, where we search for incorrect applications of semaphores in embedded software using the real-time operating system RODOS. We rely on computation tree logic (CTL) and have designed an embedded domain specific language (DSL) in Prolog to express the verification goals.Comment: In Proceedings WLP'15/'16/WFLP'16, arXiv:1701.0014