SMT02F Attitude Test Bench – COMING SOON

Description

Premise:

Most air bearings have limited applicability to real 3-D testing of ADCS as they have a limited roll and pitch angle (typically up to +/-45 deg), which limits the real testing to only yaw axis. In addition, any unbalance (displacement between sphere center and CubeSat center of gravity) higher than a few fractions of µm creates roll and pitch torques much higher than the maximum magnetorquer capabilities, preventing testing of two out of three magnetorquer axes. Furthermore, unbalances cause reaction wheel saturations preventing long term tests of ADCS subsystems. Air supply, on its own, needs important and expensive ancillary equipment.

To overcome the many limitations of spherical air bearing systems, we propose our innovative SMT02F-Attitude-Test-Bench_V2, an innovative equipment which can both:

• Forcedly rotate in 3-D, unlimited angle along any axis a CubeSat up to 12U (any angle on yaw, roll and pitch axes). It can receive rotation commands from the SMT07A-Orbital-Geomagnetic-Attitude-Software_V1;
• Mimic frictionless spherical air bearings for magnetorquers (to be used inside a Helmholtz cage) without the angular and balancing limitations of real air bearings;
• Mimic frictionless spherical air bearings for reaction wheels) without the angular limitations of real air bearings and automating the balancing procedures;

Mimic frictionless spherical air bearings for gas thrusters (under development)