Since the last eNews submission the SDP has successfully submitted and certified its last milestone, M19, and now is busy preparing for the next milestone, M20, Pre-CDR. The M20 Release Readiness Notice (RRN) was submitted in early March and contains 19 documents within the submission pack. This list includes Systems Engineering documents, Interface documentation (ICDs) and an updated snapshot of the latest SDP Architecture views since the M19 submission.
This pre-CDR milestone is a stepping stone to a successful CDR delivery in October. An incremental submission allows valuable key stakeholder feedback to be gained in particular on the architectural design to ensure continuous improvement and alignment of architectural priorities.
In addition to the finalisation of deliverables for Pre-CDR submission, other areas of focus for the Consortium are - further iterations of the SDP software architecture, advances in the SEI views of the high-level SDP architecture, continued understanding of the SDP interfaces, progress on the SDP functional model using the Algorithmic Reference Library (ARL), progress on the SDP prototyping testbed (P3) in Cambridge, progress on the SDP Integration Prototype (SIP) including end-to-end testing, consolidation of data models work, monitoring of the hardware costs evolution and updates to the corresponding predicted cost to name a few!
The sections below expand in further detail the recent work efforts and progress in the areas of platform and systems integration prototyping (P3, SIP) as well as the ARL. This work reduces risk and provides the rationale for design choices ahead of System CDR.