Spacecraft Interface Management in Concurrent Engineering Sessions

Abstract

This paper contributes to the topic of spacecraft interface and data rate management in Concurrent Engineering (CE) sessions. At DLR, CE is used together with a CE process for designing new spacecraft. The software Virtual Satellite supports this process. It provides a shared system model to the engineers to exchange design information. Until today, it supports the structural decomposition of the system and the analysis of design drivers such as the mass or power consumption of the spacecraft. During one of the S2TEP studies for a multi-mission platform it was required to have a closer look to power and data interfaces. This paper discusses the state of the art to this topic and derives a generic approach to it. This approach is customized and finally implemented in Virtual Satellite and directly applied in the S2TEP study.