DEVELOPMENT AND LABORATORY EXPERIMENTATION OF A MAGNETORQUER CONTROL SYSTEM FOR CUBESAT USING A THREE-AXIS SIMULATOR

For a small spacecraft requiring high pointing accuracy and slewing agility, ground-based test beds are strongly demanded to test and validate hardware subsystems and guidance, navigation, and control algorithms. In this paper, a magnetorquer system is developed and integrated with an existing three-axis spacecraft test bed using a spherical air bearing. The design and developing procedure of the magnetorquer system is presented in detail. Ground testing scenarios to validate the performance of the developed magnetorquer system are then introduced. To generate enough torque from the magnetorquer system, the Helmholtz coil system of the test bed provides an augmented magnetic field. Using B-dot control to detumble the small satellite simulator, the experimental results are compared with those of the numerical simulations. The comparison demonstrates the capability and effectiveness of the magnetorquer system for ground based tests.