Development of the Command and Data Handling System and Flight Software of BITSE

BITSE is a project of balloon-borne experiments for a next-generation solar coronagraph developed by a collaboration with KASI and NASA. The coronagraph is built to observe the linearly polarized brightness of solar corona with a polarization camera, a filter wheel, and an aperture door. For the observation, the coronagraph is supported by the power distribution unit (PDU), a pointing system WASP (Wallops Arc-Second Pointer), telemetry & telecommand system SIP (Support Instrument Package) which are developed at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Wallops Flight Facility, and Columbia Scientific Balloon Facility. The BITSE Command and Data Handling (C&DH) system used a cost-off-the-shelf electronics to process all data sent and received by the coronagraph, including the support system operation by RS232/422, USB3, Ethernet, and digital and analog signals. The flight software is developed using the core Flight System (cFS) which is a reusable software framework and set of reusable software applications which take advantage of a rich heritage of successful space mission of NASA. The flight software can process encoding and decoding data, control the subsystems, and provide observation autonomy. We developed a python-based testing framework to improve software reliability. The flight software development is one of the crucial contributions of KASI and an important milestone for the next project which is developing a solar coronagraph to be installed at International Space Station.