The ESOC End-to-End Ground Segment Reference Facility

Abstract

The Ground Segment for Mission Operations is a complex System of Systems, including a significant variety of complex elements, often generic and reused across missions, following adaptation to meet mission or family of missions specific requirements and configuration. For such Systems of Systems, the availability of a reference environment where individual ground segment components can be deployed and tested throughout their lifecycle, both at subsystem level and in integrated test chains up to a complete End-to-End Ground Segment, is critical. Also the representativeness of such an environment is critical, in particular the representativeness of the test scenarios with respect to the end-user use cases. At the European Space Operations Centre, the End-to-End Ground Segment Reference Facility has been established as the one-stop environment where the System level Integration and Testing of the Mission Operations Infrastructure takes place. This paper provides an insight into the technical aspects of the End-to-End Ground Segment Reference Facility, the latest achievements, an overview of the remaining challenges and the outlook of its intended evolution.

Building blocks to support implementation of a secure system engineering lifecycle at ESA

“…The intention is to traverse the attack trees in an automated way, allowing the user to follow the progression, identify any defeated security measures and requirements, indicate the security requirements verification result and highlight to the user the overall mission impact, in doing so raising their security awareness. The PenBox will be integrated into ESA's Ground Segment Reference Facility and its end-to-end automated regression testing framework [15], enhancing the facility with a security testing capability. In this manner the PenBox will form one of the key building blocks in the SSE lifecycle, interoperable with the GASF (mapping security requirements to attack trees) and the SEST (feeding test and verification results into the risk profile) tools.…”