Attitude Maneuvers with the CubeSat Control System

The CubeSat control system is designed to work with either thrusters or reaction wheels. It has a number of handy built in maneuver modes such as pointing at the sun, nadir pointing or pointing at a specific latitude and longitude on the ground. Here is the spacecraft shown in the VisualCommander interface.

CSCS

The movie in the link below shows attitude maneuvers in the VisualCommander interface. The interface has pages for the various subsystems and attitude control system functions. We start by seeing the spacecraft in a polar orbit on the Summary page. The solar arrays are reorienting themselves so that their cell faces are pointed at the sun. We switch the 3D display to look along the boresight of the telescope. We then go to the ACS page and select a sun pointing maneuver. We go back to the Summary page and see that the sun appears in the display. We then return to the ACS page and command nadir pointing. The remainder of the movie shows the reorientation maneuver to nadir pointing.

CSCS Reorientation Movie

For more information on our simulation frameworks including our real-time control system framework, ControlDeck, go to Simulation Framework page.

For more information on VisualCommander go to VisualCommander page.

You can also send us an email to find out more about our CubeSatControl System. All of these products are available now.

This entry was posted in General and tagged , , , , , by Michael Paluszek. Bookmark the permalink.

About Michael Paluszek

Michael Paluszek is President of Princeton Satellite Systems. He graduated from MIT with a degree in electrical engineering in 1976 and followed that with an Engineer's degree in Aeronautics and Astronautics from MIT in 1979. He worked at MIT for a year as a research engineer then worked at Draper Laboratory for 6 years on GN&C for human space missions. He worked at GE Astro Space from 1986 to 1992 on a variety of satellite projects including GPS IIR, Inmarsat 3 and Mars Observer. In 1992 he founded Princeton Satellite Systems.

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