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.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:TORONTO/oai:tspace.library.utoronto.ca:1807/29545 |
| Date | 24 August 2011 |
| Creators | Fournier, Marc |
| Contributors | Zee, Robert E. |
| Source Sets | University of Toronto |
| Language | en_ca |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
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