Related papers: Precise Pointing of Cubesat Telescopes: Comparison…
CubeSats and small satellites are emerging as low-cost tools to perform astronomy, exoplanet searches and earth observation. These satellites can be dedicated to pointing at targets for weeks or months at a time. This is typically not…
Accurate and stable spacecraft pointing is a requirement of many astronomical observations. Pointing particularly challenges nanosatellites because of an unfavorable surface area to mass ratio and proportionally large volume required for…
The Miniature X-ray Solar Spectrometer (MinXSS) is a 3 Unit (3U) CubeSat designed for a 3-month mission to study solar soft X-ray spectral irradiance. The first of the two flight models was deployed from the International Space Station in…
Optical navigation on a CubeSat must rely on the best extraction of the directions of some beacons from on-board images. We present an experiment on OPS-SAT, a CubeSat of the European Space Agency (ESA), that will characterize an onboard…
High-altitude balloon experiments are becoming very popular among universities and research institutes as they can be used for testing instruments eventually intended for space, and for simple astronomical observations of Solar System…
Attitude control hardware for small satellites is often limited in power and space availability given the importance of the science instruments they exist to transport. To mitigate this, a dual-spin stabilized satellite actuated via…
Due to the advancement of nano-satellite technology, CubeSats and fleets of CubeSats can form an alternative to high-cost large-size satellite missions with the advantage of extended spatial coverage. One of these initiatives is the…
Balloon-borne astronomy offers an attractive option for experiments that require precise pointing and attitude stabilization, due to a large reduction in the atmospheric interference observed by ground-based systems as well as the low-cost…
A Drag-Free CubeSat mission has been proposed to demonstrate the feasibility of a Gravitational Reference Sensor (GRS) with an optical readout for a 3 units (3U) spacecraft. A purely drag-free object is defined by the absence of all…
This paper describes the development of a magnetic attitude control subsystem for a 2U cubesat. Due to the presence of gravity gradient torques, the satellite dynamics are open-loop unstable near the desired pointing configuration.…
Air-bearing platforms for simulating the rotational dynamics of satellites require highly precise ground truth systems. Unfortunately, commercial motion capture systems used for this scope are complex and expensive. This paper shows a novel…
This paper presents a mission concept that enables Earth-Mars communications resistant to periods of solar conjunction by using CubeSat satellites equipped with a solar sail. The dynamics of the satellite is modeled separately in the…
This paper presents a nonsingular fast terminal sliding mode-based adaptive smooth control methodology for a distributed space telescope demonstration mission. The distributed space telescope has a flexible focal length that corresponds to…
A solar sail is one of the most promising space exploration system because of its theoretically infinite specific impulse using solar radiation pressure (SRP). Recently, some researchers proposed "transformable spacecrafts" that can…
CubeSat satellites are small cube-shaped space platforms that are very popular among academic, research and start-up communities mostly due to their reduced mission costs and short development time. This comes with an easy access to space,…
After many years of flying in space primarily for educational purposes, CubeSats - tiny satellites with form factors corresponding to arrangements of "1U" units, or cubes, each 10 cm on a side - have come into their own as valuable…
This paper is the second part of a series of studies discussing a novel attitude determination method for nano-satellites. Our approach is based on the utilization of thermal imaging sensors to determine the direction of the Sun and the…
The precise insertion of CubeSats into designated orbits is a complex task, primarily due to the limited propulsion capabilities and constrained fuel reserves onboard, which severely restrict the scope for large orbital corrections. This…
In this paper, we evaluate the viability of CubeSats as an attractive platform for lightweight instrumentation by describing a proof of concept CubeSat that houses an astrophotonic chip for transit spectroscopy-based exoplanet atmosphere…
Advances in GNC, particularly from miniaturized control electronics, reaction-wheels and attitude determination sensors make it possible to design surface probes and small robots to perform surface exploration and science on low-gravity…