Attitude Determination and Control Hardware Development for Small Satellites

The development of a small spacecraft attitude determination and control subsystem is described. This subsystem is part of The Space Flight Laboratory's Generic Nanosatellite Bus. With a 20cm3 body, the bus has an attitude determination and control subsystem capable of full three-axis stabilization and control enabling more advanced missions previously only possible with bulkier and more power-consuming attitude control hardware. Specific contributions to the Space Flight Lab's attitude control hardware are emphasised. Particularly, the full development of a 32g three-axis nanosatellite rate sensing unit is described. This includes embedded software development, skew calibration, hardware modeling and qualification testing for the unit. Development work on a three-axis boom-mounted magnetometer is also detailed. A full hardware design is also described for a new microsatellite-sized rate sensor. Larger and more powerful than the nanosatellite rate sensors, the design ensures a low noise, low drift architecture to improve attitude determination on future microsatellite missions.MAS