Tabletop Testbed for Attitude Determination and Control of Nanosatellites
Publication: Journal of Aerospace Engineering
Volume 32, Issue 1
Abstract
To simulate the conditions of the space environment at ground, the Laboratory of Application and Innovation in Aerospace Science (LAICA) of the University of Brasília (UnB) is developing a dedicated testbed to reproducing nanosatellite attitude motion. The testbed is composed of an air-bearing table and a Helmholtz cage. The air-bearing table is a spacecraft simulator that can simulate frictionless conditions with three rotational degrees of freedom. Balancing the simulator is essential in order to make the gravitational torque negligible. The testbed is also equipped with a Helmholtz cage to recreate the Earth’s magnetic field conditions that spacecrafts encounter in orbit. This paper presents the design and realization of this low-cost testbed. A simple and efficient automated balancing algorithm based on the least-squares method (LSM) is proposed and validated by experiments. The performance of the proposed simulator is evaluated and compared with previous works.
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Acknowledgments
This work was supported by the University of Brasília (UnB), the Federal District Research Support Foundation (FAPDF), the Coordination for the Improvement of Higher Education Personnel (CAPES), and the National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq).
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Published In
Journal of Aerospace Engineering
Volume 32 • Issue 1 • January 2019
Copyright
©2018 American Society of Civil Engineers.
History
Received: Apr 10, 2018
Accepted: Jun 18, 2018
Published online: Sep 28, 2018
Published in print: Jan 1, 2019
Discussion open until: Feb 28, 2019
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