Attitude motion and sensor bias estimation onboard the SiriusSat-1 nanosatellite using magnetometer only

Abstract

The performance of the attitude motion determination algorithm of the SiriusSat-1 nanosatellite is presented. Onboard magnetometer measurements are used. These measurements are strongly affected by the 1U CubeSat onboard magnetic dipoles. The magnetometer bias turned out to be large and rapidly varying according to the estimation by the least squares method (LSM). An extended Kalman Filter (EKF) is applied to track the bias in real time in order to improve the attitude motion determination accuracy. The developed algorithm is first tested on the flight data using the satellite onboard computer prototype. Then the corresponding software was successfully uploaded on the satellite in orbit. In-flight algorithm performance onboard the SiriusSat-1 nanosatellite is evaluated in the paper.