Analysis of Verification and Validation Techniques for Educational CubeSat Programs

Since their creation, CubeSats have become a valuable educational tool for university science and engineering programs. Unfortunately, while aerospace companies invest resources to develop verification and validation methodologies based on larger-scale aerospace projects, university programs tend to focus resources on spacecraft development. This paper looks at two different types of methodologies in an attempt to improve CubeSat reliability: generating software requirements and utilizing system and software architecture modeling. Both the Consortium Requirements Engineering (CoRE) method for software requirements and the Monterey Phoenix modeling language for architecture modeling were tested for usability in the context of PolySat, Cal Poly\u27s CubeSat research program. In the end, neither CoRE nor Monterey Phoenix provided the desired results for improving PolySat\u27s current development procedures. While a modified version of CoRE discussed in this paper does allow for basic software requirements to be generated, the resulting specification does not provide any more granularity than PolySat\u27s current institutional knowledge. Furthermore, while Monterey Phoenix is a good tool to introduce students to model-based systems engineering (MBSE) concepts, the resulting graphs generated for a PolySat specific project were high-level and did not find any issues previously discovered through trial and error methodologies. While neither method works for PolySat, the aforementioned results do provide benefits for university programs looking to begin developing CubeSats