Electrical ground support equipment for the ESA NewAthena wide field imager

The Wide Field Imager (WFI) is one of the two instruments of the X-ray Advanced Telescope for High-Energy Astrophysics (NewAthena) mission selected by ESA. The WFI satellite telescope uses a camera fitted with DEPFET sensors, instrument electronics to control the camera and readout the sensors, as well as additional electronic units to communicate with the spacecraft on-board-computer. WFI successfully passed the instrument system requirement review (I-SRR) in March 2022. In 2023, NewAthena went through a redefinition phase in order to save cost, and on February 2024 the mission restarted again. Currently, a WFI Engineering Model (EM) consisting of the Camera Head Sub-System (CHS) and Detector Electronics Sub-System (DES) is being developed. A Structural and Thermal Model (STM) has also been created as an intermediate development step to gain design insights with respect to thermal and structural properties. The objective of these developments is to gain knowledge on the road to develop the WFI Flight Model (FM). Mechanical and environmental tests will be performed at the X4 and PUMA test facilities of the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics. In this paper, we present the electrical ground support equipment (EGSE) for WFI and in particular for these tests. The WFI EGSE consist of hardware and software to test the WFI instrument. It provides power control, temperature sensing, time synchronization, an interface to program FPGAs and microcontrollers, and the software necessary to control the instrument and acquire the science data. Dedicated telemetry and telecommand software tools have been developed to communicate via the SpaceWire interface with the WFI instrument. The software architecture and EGSE design trade-offs are also presented.