A Satellite Attitude Dynamics Simulator (SADS) has been developed to facilitate the research and development of spacecraft flight attitude control software at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, CA. The simulator provides a real-time 3 degree of freedom (3DOF) synthetic spacecraft hardware-in-the-loop environment, that includes realistic angular motions, sensor-effector delays, and contr...

Simulation technology is becoming increasingly crucial in the design and optimization of satellites due to the difficulties in testing and verifying system parameters on the ground. Computationally tractable and accurate methods are required in order to test satellite parameters in the complex and dynamic space environment. Although various satellite teams have developed simulation tools, many ...

AbstructA few thousands of far ultraviolet images of the ionosphere were obtained since December 1986 by the Atmospheric/Ionospheric Remote Sensor (AIRS) aboard the Polar BEAR satellite. Fast algorithms for applying automated satelliteattitude, geometric, and photometric corrections to these images were developed, and the first results are discussed. A software package that is based on these al...

of Dissertation Presented to the Graduate School of the University of Florida in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy NONLINEAR CONTROL FOR SYSTEMS CONTAINING INPUT UNCERTAINTY VIA A LYAPUNOV-BASED APPROACH By William MacKunis May 2009 Chair: Dr. Warren E. Dixon Major: Aerospace Engineering Controllers are often designed based on the assumption that a c...

The Flying Laptop is a micro-satellite currently under development by the Institute of Space Systems. Several promising technologies will be implemented. A high agile attitude control system with a pointing knowledge better than 7 arcseconds, operating in a target pointing mode for image acquisition is necessary to achieve the planned scientific measurements. For communication a high speed Ka-b...

A control system is proposed for a low Earth orbit gravity gradient stabilised microsatellite using Z wheel. The microsatellite is 3-axis stabilized using a yaw reaction wheel, with dual redundant 3-axis magnetorquers. Two vector magnetometers and four dual sun sensors are carried in order to determine the full attitude. The attitude was estimated using an Euler angles (small libration version)...

This paper proposes a new concept for attitude actuation for small satellites that uses active magnetic bearings to support and tilt a spinning rotor to provide 3-axis attitude control of the satellite using a single actuator. A controlled 3D motion in the spinning rotor provides a conventional torque output about the momentum axis and a gyroscopic torque output about any direction in the plane...

Sliding mode control algorithms with classical and modified discontinuous reaching laws for purely magnetic attitude control of small satellites are proposed and compared with each other in this work. They are designed by following the steps characteristic to the variable structure control method and the magnetic attitude control problem. The asymptotical stability of the control laws is proven...

The Satellite Navigation and Positioning (SNAP) group at The University of New South Wales has been conducting research into high precision attitude determination using a multi-antenna single-frequency GPS array, aided by low grade angular rate gyros. The objective of the research is to develop an accurate, reliable attitude sensor solution at an affordable cost which can be implemented on UAVs...

Tethered Space Robot (TSR), which is connected to a mother spacecraft through a peace of tether, is a new space system proposed in the previous work. Expected applications are satellite servicing, retrieval of debris, inspection of space structure, soft landing, and so on. TSR differs from the existing tethered systems. We envision the tethered subsatellite to be a multi-body system, whose atti...