Project 6: Three-Axis Attitude Control for Nanosatellites
Adviser(s): Victoria Coverstone (Professor, Aerospace Engineering)
Project description:
Over the past five years, the Illinois Orbiting Nanosatel-lite (ION) Projects have given over 125 students across 7 engineering disciplines an opportunity to work on a large systems engineering project from concept development, design and construction, functional testing, delivery of hardware and development of an operational ground station. ION-1 shown in Fig. 1 was a 2 kg Cubesat designed to test several advanced techno-logies. ION-2 named "ION-Hydro," has been in development for one year and consists of two photometers pointed upwards to measure hydrogen airglow and background contamination. The first-year objectives of ION-Hydro were to develop a common bus design that supports a variety of payloads that are envisioned as potential missions. ION-Hydro will have three-axis active attitude control using torque coils, magnetometers and sun sensors. The computer processing approach on ION-Hydro is distributed and will use commercially available processors and distributed programmable integrated circuits. The bus design, manufacturing and functional testing are scheduled to be completed by May 2008. The research objective during the summer of 2008 is to develop and test position and attitude control algorithms to achieve a defined separation between two cubesats while maintaining individual pointing requirements.
Student background and expected research activities: Senior in Aerospace or Mechanical Engineering. Knowledge of the dynamics of rigid bodies, linear control theory, orbital mechanics and computer programming is required. Student will be implementing and functionally testing the spacecraft attitude control algorithm on spaceflight hardware and will be an integral part of the multi-disciplinary team working on the nanosatellite.
Fig. 1. ION-1 student designed, built and tested nano-satellite.
Point(s) of contact: Prof. Coverstone, vcc@illinois.edu
