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.
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.
The Dalian-1 Lianli has been installed with the OpenHarmony real-time operating system. Illustration: Handout
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.
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.
