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Long Duration Testing

Long duration testing subjects spacecraft software, firmware, hardware, and relevant integrated ground interfaces, or representative simulation and emulation environments, to extended test execution of 30 days or more to expose security and reliability defects that may manifest only after prolonged operation or specific time-dependent conditions. Race conditions, memory or resource leaks, time-dependent state corruption, resource exhaustion, counter rollover, and time-triggered malicious behavior may not manifest during short-duration testing because their activation depends on accumulated runtime, rare timing interactions, or gradual changes in system state. Long duration testing increases the opportunity to expose these conditions before deployment and complements static analysis, formal analysis, stress testing, fault injection, and targeted rollover testing. Testing should use the highest-fidelity environment appropriate to the test objectives. Flight-representative hardware should be used where hardware timing, device behavior, or integration effects are material; validated simulation or emulation may be used for conditions that it represents with sufficient fidelity. Differences between the test environment and operational system must be documented and considered when interpreting results.

ID: CM0046
Tier: II
Ground CM 
Created: 2022/10/19
Last Modified: 2026/08/06

Pre-Operations Government

Acquisition requirements should mandate long duration testing as a distinct test program activity, separate from functional verification and short-duration security testing, with specifications defining the minimum test duration, the test environment fidelity required, and the categories of vulnerability the testing is intended to expose, including race conditions, timing attacks, resource exhaustion, and counter or timer rollover conditions. Requirements should define the fidelity needed for each test objective and require documentation of the test environment, modeled behaviors, known limitations, and differences from the operational system. Flight-representative hardware must be used where the relevant behavior cannot be represented with sufficient fidelity through simulation or emulation. Contract language should require that long duration test plans, including the test configuration, monitoring approach, anomaly capture procedures, and pass/fail criteria, be submitted as controlled deliverables for government review before testing begins. Evaluation criteria should assess offerors' proposed long duration test methodology, their experience identifying timing-dependent vulnerabilities in space or similarly constrained embedded systems, and their proposed approach to anomaly detection and triage during extended test runs. Verification should include review of test execution records and anomaly reports, with detected anomalies assessed for security, safety, reliability, and mission impact. Findings must be corrected, mitigated, or formally dispositioned through the program’s risk-acceptance and launch-authorization processes.

Pre-Operations Developer/Supplier

Long duration test planning must be integrated into the program schedule as a resource-intensive activity requiring dedicated hardware, infrastructure, and monitoring personnel for the full test duration, with planning initiated early enough that identified anomalies can be investigated, root-caused, and remediated within the available pre-launch schedule margin. Test environment selection requires a documented fidelity assessment based on the conditions being evaluated. Where scheduler behavior, interrupt handling, memory management, device timing, or hardware timers affect the test objective, the environment must reproduce or incorporate those behaviors with sufficient fidelity, and any limitations must be documented. Multiple complementary environments may be necessary to obtain both representative timing behavior and adequate observability. The test configuration should represent the approved operational software and hardware baseline and exercise realistic mission timelines, command and telemetry traffic, mode transitions, workload variation, contact cycles, and applicable stress conditions. Controlled fault injection or accelerated test conditions may be incorporated when they support defined test objectives, but their effects must be distinguishable from anomalies arising through ordinary extended execution. Automated monitoring and logging must be configured before the test begins to capture anomalous events, unexpected state transitions, resource utilization trends, and timing violations throughout the full test duration without requiring continuous human observation, as manual monitoring of a 30-plus-day test is not operationally feasible. Anomaly triage procedures should be defined before testing begins, specifying how detected anomalies will be classified by severity, investigated, and tracked so that the test program produces actionable findings rather than an unstructured anomaly log.