The ZIPSIM Series of High Performance, High Fidelity Spacecraft Simulators

This paper describes the architecture and applications of the ZIPSIM series of spacecraft simulators. ZIPSIM is the foundation upon which spacecraft simulators are built at either the register-transfer level or lower level of fidelity. A simulator for a particular spacecraft is built by combining mission-specific components with standard ZIPSIM components. ZIPSIM provides standardized capabilities including utilization of multi-processor hosts, common components (e.g. schedulers, graphical and command-line interfaces, and data displays), reusable models (e.g. processors such as MIL-STD-1750A), uplink and telemetry interfaces related to Mission Operations at JPL, standards for runtime establishment and operation of component interconnections, and a standard command language (Tcl/Tk) for configuring and operating a simulator. An automatic code generator based on the CLIPS expert system is used to generate some of the support code