End-to-end validation process for the INTA-Nanosat-1B Attitude Control System

This paper describes the end-to-end validation process for the Attitude Control Subsystem (ACS) of the satellite INTA-NanoSat-1B (NS-1B). This satellite was launched on July 2009 and it has been fully operative since then. The development of its ACS modules required an exhaustive integration and a system-level validation program. Some of the tests were centred on the validation of the drivers of sensors and actuators and were carried out over the flying model of the satellite. Others, more complex, constituted end-to-end tests where the concurrency of modules, the real-time control requirements and even the well-formedness of the telemetry data were verified. This work presents an incremental and highly automatised way for performing the ACS validation program based on two development suites and an end-to-end validation environment. The validation environment combines a Flat Satellite (FlatSat) configuration and a real-time emulator working in closed-loop. The FlatSat is built using the NS-1B Qualification Model (QM) hardware and it can run a complete version of the on-board software with the ACS modules fully integrated. The real-time emulator, running on an industrial PC, samples the actuation signals and emulates the sensors signals to close the control loop with the FlatSat. This validation environment constitutes a low-cost alternative to the classical three axes tilt table, with the advantage of being easily configured for working under specific orbit conditions, in accordance with any of the selected tests. The approach has been successfully applied to the NS-1B in order to verify different ACS modes under multiple orbit scenarios, providing an exhaustive coverage and reducing the risk of eventual errors during the satellite's lifetime. The strategy was applied also during the validation of the maintenance and reconfiguration procedures required once the satellite was launched. This paper describes in detail the complete ACS validation process that was performed and it shows the most relevant errors detected and fixed during testing. Finally it summarises some of the most significant conclusions.