An active attitude control system for a drag sail satellite

• An active Cubesat drag sail attitude control system is proposed.
• ADCS sensors, actuators and a novel 2-axis translation stage are presented.
• Attitude control and estimation modes from detumbling to 3-axis stabilisation.
• Simulation results to predict in-orbit performance pre- and post-sail deployment.
• Hardware-in-loop testing of flight ADCS software in real time for onboard computer.

The paper describes the development and simulation results of a full ADCS subsystem for the deOrbitSail drag sail mission. The deOrbitSail satellite was developed as part of an European FP7 collaboration research project. The satellite was launched and commissioning started on 10th July 2015. Various new actuators and sensors designed for this mission will be presented. The deOrbitSail satellite is a 3U CubeSat to deploy a 4 by 4 m drag sail from an initial 650 km circular polar low earth orbit. With an active attitude control system it will be shown that by maximising the drag force, the expected de-orbiting period from the initial altitude will be less than 50 days. A future application of this technology will be the use of small drag sails as low-cost devices to de-orbit LEO satellites, when they have reached their end of life, without having to use expensive propulsion systems. Simulation and Hardware-in-Loop experiments proved the feasibility of the proposed attitude control system. A magnetic-only control approach using a Y-Thomson spin, is used to detumble the 3U Cubesat with stowed sail and subsequently to 3-axis stabilise the satellite to be ready for the final deployment phase. Minituarised torquer rods, a nano-sized momentum wheel, attitude sensor hardware (magnetometer, sun, earth) developed for this phase will be presented. The final phase will be to deploy and 3-axis stabilise the drag sail normal to the satellite’s velocity vector, using a combined Y-momentum wheel and magnetic controller. The design and performance improvements when using a 2-axis translation stage to adjust the sail centre-of-pressure to satellite centre-of-mass offset, will also be discussed, although for launch risk reasons this stage was not included in the final flight configuration. To accurately determine the drag sail’s attitude during the sunlit part of the orbit, an accurate wide field of view dual sensor to measure both the sun and nadir vector direction was developed for this mission. The calibration results for this new Cubesat sensor (CubeSense), will also be presented.