China has successfully tested a home-grown operating system in space, marking a major step towards reducing reliance on foreign software and boosting the performance of future small satellites.
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More than 1,000 hours of in-orbit testing were conducted aboard the Dalian-1 Lianli CubeSat to evaluate how satellite subsystems performed under the OpenHarmony real-time operating system (RTOS) – a lightweight version of Huawei’s open-source operation platform, according to a team of researchers from the Chinese cities of Dalian and Xian.
With OpenHarmony, the suitcase-sized satellite, which was released from China’s Tiangong space station last year, delivered faster data updates and improved stability compared with earlier set-ups using simpler firmware or foreign software, the researchers reported in the latest issue of the journal Space: Science and Technology.
“The Lianli satellite mission showed that using the OpenHarmony real-time operating system significantly improved the satellite’s response speed and reliability,” Yu Xiaozhou, the paper’s lead author and a professor at Dalian University of Technology, told Chinese media in May.
As the first microsatellite to carry the OpenHarmony RTOS, Lianli also ran on a domestically produced chip, “achieving a fully home-grown hardware-software solution in the field, and offering a new option for spacecraft operating systems worldwide”, according to Chinese media reports.
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Following the Lianli mission, Yu and colleagues proposed national technical standards to guide how OpenHarmony is used in small satellites – a step intended to encourage broader adoption, which is already taking place across both commercial and research satellite missions in China.