Meet the team: ZEUS
Femto-satellites are an emerging class of spacecraft characterised by a total mass of under 100 g. While a few femto-satellites designs have been proposed to date, the key aspect of attitude control (i.e. controlling the orientation of the spacecraft) at this extremely small length-scale remains largely unaddressed from an experimental perspective.
ZEUS aims to investigate an attitude control system designed for a femto-satellite that is currently being developed by the Emerging Space Technologies group at the University of Glasgow, with support from the Royal Academy of Engineering. The aim of the ZEUS experiment is to test various attitude control strategies for this novel femto-satellite, and quantitatively characterise their performance. These control strategies are based on a magnetic control system. More specifically, they make use of electromagnetic coils mounted on the satellite (also known as magnetorquers) to control the orientation of the spacecraft in an ambient magnetic field provided by a system of 3 orthogonal sets of 2 electromagnetic coils (also known as Helmholtz coils). While magnetorquers are a very common means of controlling spacecraft orientation, magnetic control has, to our knowledge, not yet been validated in practice at such extreme length-scales. The ESA Fly Your Thesis! programme is the perfect avenue to conduct our experiment, given that microgravity enables us to test our control algorithms without the need for a dedicated three-degree-of-freedom laboratory-scale test platform. Furthermore, a parabolic flight enables us to statistically validate our findings due to the possibility of repeating the experiment under the same conditions over a large number of parabolas.
Our team, comprised of four students from the University of Glasgow with an international background (British, Polish, and Romanian nationals), aims to experimentally investigate control strategies that could be considered for femto-satellite attitude control. We expect that data collected through this experiment shall provide key insight into validating these control strategies.
Finally, quantifying the performance of this femto-satellite attitude control system represents a key milestone on the path to future femto-satellite in-orbit demonstration.
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