Software Construction and Analysis Tools for Future Space Missions

NASA and its international partners will increasingly depend on software-based systems to implement advanced functions for future space missions, such as Martian rovers that autonomously navigate long distances exploring geographic features formed by surface water early in the planet’s history. The software-based functions for these missions will need to be robust and highly reliable, raising significant challenges in the context of recent Mars mission failures attributed to software faults. After reviewing these challenges, this paper describes tools that have been developed at NASA Ames that could contribute to meeting these challenges: 1) Program synthesis tools based on automated inference that generate documentation for manual review and annotations for automated certification. 2) Model-checking tools for concurrent object-oriented software that achieve scalability through synergy with program abstraction and static analysis tools.