A systematic approach to the Planck LFI end-to-end test and its application to the DPC Level 1 pipeline

TL;DR

This paper details a comprehensive validation approach for the Level 1 data processing software of the Planck LFI mission, ensuring data quality and compliance with project standards through end-to-end testing methods.

Contribution

It introduces a systematic validation procedure for the Planck LFI Level 1 software, combining real telemetry injection and comparison techniques to verify data processing accuracy.

Findings

Validation confirmed the correctness of scientific data processing.

Housekeeping telemetry validation ensured parameter accuracy.

The approach demonstrated compliance with project requirements.

Abstract

The Level 1 of the Planck LFI Data Processing Centre (DPC) is devoted to the handling of the scientific and housekeeping telemetry. It is a critical component of the Planck ground segment which has to strictly commit to the project schedule to be ready for the launch and flight operations. In order to guarantee the quality necessary to achieve the objectives of the Planck mission, the design and development of the Level 1 software has followed the ESA Software Engineering Standards. A fundamental step in the software life cycle is the Verification and Validation of the software. The purpose of this work is to show an example of procedures, test development and analysis successfully applied to a key software project of an ESA mission. We present the end-to-end validation tests performed on the Level 1 of the LFI-DPC, by detailing the methods used and the results obtained. Different approaches have been used to test the scientific and housekeeping data processing. Scientific data processing has been tested by injecting signals with known properties directly into the acquisition electronics, in order to generate a test dataset of real telemetry data and reproduce as much as possible nominal conditions. For the HK telemetry processing, validation software have been developed to inject known parameter values into a set of real housekeeping packets and perform a comparison with the corresponding timelines generated by the Level 1. With the proposed validation and verification procedure, where the on-board and ground processing are viewed as a single pipeline, we demonstrated that the scientific and housekeeping processing of the Planck-LFI raw data is correct and meets the project requirements.