NASA Operational Simulator (NOS) for V&V of complex systems

This paper describes the development, capabilities and utility of the NASA Operational Simulator (NOS), a generic software-only simulation architecture developed for NASA missions. NOS was developed by the NASA’s Independent Verification and Validation (IV&V) Independent Test Capability (ITC) team and is primarily utilized by software developers and (independent) testers to verify the functionality of a spacecraft’s flight software from a system-wide perspective. NOS was initially developed in support of a software-only simulator for the Global Precipitation Measurement (GPM) mission to support verification and validation activities for NASA’s IV&V Program. Due to the successes of the GPM simulator (GO-SIM), the NOS architecture is being reused to develop a simulation environment in support of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). While NOS has primarily been utilized on NASA missions, its generic architecture can be easily applied across domains to support V&V of complex systems.