A hardware-in-the-loop simulation facility for the attitude determination and control system of SUNSAT

[摘要] ENGLISH ABSTRACT: hardware-in-the-Ioop simulation facility was developed for the attitudedetermination and control system (ADCS) of the Stellenbosch University Satellite(SUNSAT), a low earth orbit, nadir pointing microsatellite. Software simulationswere created to describe the orbital and attitude dynamics of the satellite, and also todescribe the space environment, including the geomagnetic field, sun, earth horisonand star field. Hardware emulators were designed to emulate the interfaces of thesatellite's sensors and actuators with the ADCS tray. The simulation software and thehardware emulators were then combined to systematically close the hardware looparound the engineering model of SUNSAT's ADCS.A satellite-in-the-Ioop simulation mode was also included in the hardware-in-the-Ioopsimulation facility so that whole orbit data collected and recorded by the SUNSATflight model and transmitted to the ground station could be fed to simulations of theon-board ADCS algorithms. The satellite-in-the-Ioop simulation was used toinvestigate an unmodelled disturbance torque acting on the satellite body which' wasrevealed by the whole orbit data.

[发布机构] Stellenbosch University