With the growing amount of data produced by instruments and the increasing importance of the payload element that delivers the added value of the missions, a satellite can be regarded as a distributed system with a platform integrating all the traditional on-board control functions (Attitude and Orbit Control and Data Handling Control) and collaborating with the payload through the spacecraft bus. In PISA, we investigate tools and methods to develop a payload controller based on a single embedded computer integrating instrument control software components developed by several PI teams. A hardware demonstrator based on PowerPC running RTAI Linux is also presented
