Enhanced Test Data Management in Spacecraft Ground Testing: A Practical Approach for Centralized Storage and Automated Processing

Abstract

In recent years, spacecraft have been developed to support higher data-rate communication systems and accommodate a wider range of payloads. These advancements have led to the generation of large volumes of data and increased system complexity. In particular, during the ground-testing phase, the need for an effective test data management strategy has become increasingly important to improve test efficiency and reduce costs, as sorting, distributing, and analyzing extensive test data is both time consuming and resource intensive. To address these challenges, this study introduces a practical and implementation-oriented autonomous system for centralized test data handling, which has been successfully applied and verified during actual spacecraft development and ground testing operations. The system enables the rapid transfer of test data to centralized storage without waiting for test completion or requiring human intervention by utilizing an event-triggered architecture. In addition, it automatically provides the transferred test data in multiple formats tailored to each engineering team, facilitating effective data comparison and analysis. It also performs automated test data validation without manual input. The performance of the enhanced test data management was evaluated through big-data analysis of logs generated during automated test data transfer and post-processing in actual spacecraft ground tests.