ITU-pSAT II: High-precision nanosatellite ADCS development project

Abstract

ITU-pSAT II project aims to design and develop standardized bus architecture and an ADCS for pico and nano sized satellites. In order for nano-satellites to perform more capable missions, precise attitude control and more capable bus designs are needed. ITU-PSAT II is considered as follow-on to the ITU-PSAT I project, it includes multi-purpose bus and a 3-axis controlled platform, which can be used in future missions with different payload configurations. ITU-pSAT II bus and ADCS operation architecture also embeds a health monitoring system in order to cooperatively detect and successfully handle the highly possible failure modes (such as sensor, actuator failures and errors). In this paper, we review the architecture of ADCS, its subcomponents and strategy of combining ADCS operation modes.