  Planetary science space missions need high quality software ed efficient
algorithms in order to extract innovative scientific results from flight data.
Reliable and efficient software technologies are increasingly vital to improve
and prolong the exploiting of the results of a mission, to allow the
application of established algorithms and technologies also to future space
missions and for the scientific analysis of archived data. Here after will be
given an in-depth analysis study accompanied by implementation examples on ESA
and ASI missions and some remarkable results fruit of decades of important
experience reached by space agencies and research institutes in the field.
Space applications software quality analysis is not different from other
application contexts, among the hi-tech and hi-reliability fields. We describe
here a Software Quality study in general, then we will focus on the quality of
space mission software (s/w) with details on some notable cases.
