A fault-tolerant magnetic spin stabilizing controller for the JC2Sat-FF mission

This paper presents a spin-stabilization algorithm for the Japan Canada Joint Collaboration Satellite-Formation Flying (JC2Sat-FF) mission using magnetic actuation only. It is shown that under a reasonable assumption on the Earth’s magnetic field, the resulting control law is asymptotically stabilizing for an axisymmetric spacecraft, even under the failure of up to two magnetic torque rods and magnetic torque rod saturation. It is also stabilizing under quantization. The satellite motion remains stable under control outages, meaning that the error can be reduced by implementing the control intermittently. The effectiveness of the control law is demonstrated using a high fidelity attitude control system simulator for the JC2Sat-FF satellite.