ARIEL-AIRS Electrical Ground Support Equipment (EGSE): building a flexible hardware and software solution that could be used for future projects

The ARIEL space telescope (ESA) will study the atmosphere of hundreds of exoplanets through its infrared spectrometer, named AIRS developed by a French consortium of laboratories. To enable this development, CEA teams have worked on a flexible and reliable solution of EGSE. The EGSE shall allow the full control and readout of the two acquisition chains of the instrument : communication with the AIRS Detector Control Unit (A-DCU), power supply, images and housekeeping data acquisition and their display in real time, data storage and log of all sent commands. We have build five EGSEs fully integrated into movable racks that can easily follow AIRS on various testing environments. The software is made of LabVIEW (NI) for the graphic interfaces and Python to build elaborated sequences of tests. The modularity and parametrization of these EGSEs would enable to adapt the software to next missions which require the same needs.