Case Study: Swedish Space Corporation achieves 50% faster AOCS development and SMART-1 lunar orbit with MathWorks Model-Based Design

ESA's First-Ever Lunar Mission Satellite Orbits Moon with Automatically Generated Flight Code

Swedish Space Corporation (SSC) was the prime contractor for ESA’s SMART‑1 lunar mission and faced a tight, low‑cost mandate to develop the satellite’s attitude and orbit control system (AOCS) in under two years while meeting strict software standards and surviving harsh space environments. To meet these constraints SSC turned to MathWorks’ Model‑Based Design tools—including Simulink, Stateflow, Embedded Coder, and MATLAB—to create a rigorous proof‑chain of simulation and test cases for the flight software.

Using MathWorks tools, SSC modeled and simulated the AOCS, automatically generated C code, and executed unit, integration, and system tests (including hardware‑in‑the‑loop and ESTEC verification), then deployed the software on a radiation‑hardened ERC32 processor. MathWorks’ solution cut development time by about 50%, improved process efficiency by reducing design iterations and coding errors, and produced generated code with RAM, ROM, and execution performance comparable to hand‑written code—enabling SMART‑1 to achieve its mission milestones and informing SSC’s plan to use MathWorks tools for nearly all future onboard software.

Swedish Space Corporation

Per Bodin

SMART-1 AOCS Manager