NASA GSFC SmallSats – A NOS3 Case Study

The NASA Operational Simulator for Small Satellites (NOS3) has now been in existence since 2016. It was originally developed as one of the main goals of the Simulation-To-Flight 1 CubeSat effort. Subsequently, portions of NOS3 were released as open source (https://github.com/nasa/nos3) in 2018.

Beginning in 2019, NOS3 was used for the development of a number of NASA CubeSats. This presentation will describe the use of NOS3 in that development. It will describe how NOS3 was used to develop and test numerous components for the CubeSats including the development of hardware component simulators. It will describe the benefits of using NOS3 for component development. It will also describe how NOS3 was used for integrating attitude control system software with flight software. This included executing closed loop attitude control for the CubeSats using simulated hardware sensors and actuators. The benefits of using NOS3 for this integration will also be described.