Qualification of the attitude control system of the E-band CubeSat EIVE

The 6U CubeSat EIVE was developed for the verification of an E-band link from space to ground. Establishing such a link presents challenging requirements for the development of an attitude control system of a CubeSat. To verify the functionality of its components, both the sensors and actuators, a number of tests were conducted prior to launch. These ranged from simple functionality tests to performance tests and were accompanied by calibration campaigns. Qualification of the attitude control algorithms proved to be a challenge, as a fitting simulator setup was not available. Therefore, limited tests comparing the onboard software code to MatLab algorithms were used. This paper presents the types of tests conducted during the qualification campaign and their significance. On-ground behavior is compared to in-orbit telemetry. The issues detected during ground tests as well as the issues achieving significant results from the tests are discussed and compared to the problems detected during launch and early orbit phase. These comparisons illustrate the shortcomings of some of the tests executed and improvements for the validity of some tests are presented.