Drawing on their experience building complex software for simulating spaceflight, Portuguese scientists have created a 21st-century way of detecting banking fraud here on Earth. Today, every electronic purchase in Portugal runs through their software. Around the globe, Feedzai products screen some US$229 billion-worth of payments every year.

But what do space missions and software designed to find thieves have in common? More than you might think – in addition to high-tech hardware, space missions require a great deal of sophisticated software.

"When you launch a spacecraft, you need software to guide it," explained Feedzai's Paulo Marques, who was an ESA consultant before founding Feedzai in 2009. "You also need software for communications from the ground."

Long before a spacecraft is launched, the software must be thoroughly tested for flaws. There's just one problem, explained Paulo: "You don't have an actual spacecraft yet."

So, scientists build a software universe to simulate the mission.

"What you need to have is something that represents the spacecraft, mission control and ground stations, along with many other components, in order to check it all."

At ESA, Paulo and Feedzai's Nuno Sebastiao called on high-performance computing techniques to create virtual satellites: "Clusters of computers pretend to be everything involved. A computer acts like a spacecraft."

The software must be very robust in order to mimic each element of the mission and spacecraft perfectly.

And it must be able to do this quickly – in far less time than it would take to complete an actual mission.

"The software has to be able to process all the information it gets in a very, very effective way," said Paulo, "as if it were the real spacecraft."

Spacecraft operators also train using this software. "You are not going to put a spacecraft in the hands of someone who hasn't trained before."

Space experience for stopping fraud

Fraud detection and space mission software face similar challenges. For one thing, both need to process huge amounts of information in real time. "If we talk about a bank, you need to process thousands of transactions every single second."

In bank fraud detection, as in space, software must recognise anything that is out of the ordinary.

In space, an unexpected change in temperature could indicate a crack in the wall. In banking, anomalies often point to fraud: if a petrol station suddenly starts generating sales figures like those of a luxury car dealership, it is a sign of trouble.