MATE: Modern Software Technology for Flight Test Automation and Orchestration

The development of advanced technologies for flight testing, measurement, and data acquisition are critical to effectively meeting the future goals and challenges faced by NASA and the aerospace industry. Space systems have become increasingly complex where the development of each system may be geographically distributed across organizations and subsystems. When performing an integrated flight test, the main problems that must be addressed are test orchestration and measurement/data acquisition. The main issue with both areas typically arises from the fact that each system component may employ various disparate interfaces which may be in addition to the direct interfaces used during flight. Effective flight tests will also likely involve the integration of multiple simulations and other test equipment to provide inputs and feedback for real-world scenarios. The proposed innovation is a scalable architectural software framework known as the mREST Automated Test Environment (MATE) which addresses the technical issues commonly associated with flight testing, measurement, and data acquisition by providing comprehensive flight test orchestration and data measurement/acquisition capabilities in both centralized and distributed environments. MATE has the potential to significantly optimize current flight test methodologies without levying new requirements on each test element. The proposed software framework is based on the mREST Architecture and Interface Specification which is a specific implementation of a RESTful web-services architecture that resulted from research and prototyping efforts performed by METECS for the Johnson Space Center (JSC).