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Completed TRL 3 (started at 3, targeting 5)
NASA’s core Flight System (cFS) is Goddard-developed software that provides the foundation for a flight software (FSW) system. cFS is written in C, a language that provides no protections against memory or concurrency errors that can cause mission-ending bugs or security vulnerabilities and requires expensive verification pre-launch. This project converts portions of the core Flight Executive (cFE), the heart of cFS, to the Rust language to gain memory and concurrency safety and provide a native Rust application programming interface (API) to allow projects to optionally begin writing future apps in Rust, while remaining backward compatible with existing apps in the C language.
The Rust language prevents situations that can cause memory and concurrency (timing) errors at compile time. Code written in Rust can therefore access memory and perform tasks in parallel without memory and race condition related bugs that can cause cybersecurity vulnerabilities, crash the spacecraft, or even prematurely end the mission. By updating cFE to use Rust, foundational software that makes up the heart of many flight systems at NASA will be immune from such problems. By catching issues at compile time, FSW will also be easier to validate during integration & test, leading to fewer expensive and time-consuming changes later. Finally, by exposing a new API to develop mission apps in Rust, missions will be able to choose to develop some of their apps in Rust, getting the same guarantees that will apply to the core software.
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