Verification and integration of the management and control software for the Near Infrared Spectrometer Photometer of the Euclid space mission

The thesis comprises five chapters covering different items and phases of the work accomplished during my Ph.D program. Such work is part of the Euclid Project, a very high-profile space-based scientific mission designed to accurately measure the expansion history of the universe and the growth of cosmic structures. The first chapter is an introduction to the Euclid space mission and a description of Euclid’s scientific goals and instrumentation. The payload is a telescope that hosts two instruments capable of taking images at different wavelengths. In particular, the chapter provides a detailed description of the Near Infrared Spectrometer Photometer (NISP). The second chapter presents a detailed description of the NISP Warm Electronics (WE) with particular emphasis on the Data Processing Unit (DPU), the Instrument Control Unit (ICU), their application software (ASW), and the communication among them. The Assembly, Integration, Validation, and Testing (AIV/AIT) of such boards and the corresponding software are the main subjects of my Ph.D. study. Chapters 3, 4, and 5 which take into consideration the AIV activities and the specifically designed software tools, detail my contribution to the NISP WE AIV. The AIV of the NISP on-board software required a careful design and the development of software tools to verify functionality and performances. Great care was taken in the development of the software of the DPU test equipment controlling the interface with the DPU. I developed it in close cooperation with the NISP AIV/AIT team, the NISP-Electrical Ground Support Equipment (EGSE) team, and two industries (OHB Italia for the DPU hardware design and construction and Temis for the procurement of the DPU TE). The developed software was delivered to the industries and is now used for the validation of the DPU Electro Qualified Model (EQM) and the Flight Model (FM). Chapter 4 describes the DPU test campaign. I took part in the integration of the Application Software in the DPU board at OHB Italy and at INAF Padua. Chapter 5 illustrates the AIV/AIT activity for the validation of the NISP Avionic Model (AVM) before delivery to Thales Alenia Space Italia (TAS-I).