Herschel-SPIRE satellite instrument: configurable On-Board Software for autonomous and real time operation

The Herschel SPIRE On-Board Software (OBS) is presented. This real time operational software controls the scientific data transmission and keeps a control layer between the SPIRE Mission Timeline (MTL) and the real instruments status. It embeds a multithreaded engine that interprets control procedures for the detector and mechanism subsystems. An autonomous monitoring agent keeps control of subsystems status, and takes local decisions based on pre-loaded reaction maps. The behaviour of low level system functions is configurable remotely via the reactions maps and control procedures.