Sun-pointing safe control for atmospheric environment monitoring satellite using magnetic actuation

Abstract

The design of sun-pointing safe controller is an important part of spacecraft attitude determination and control system. In this work, a new spin stabilization algorithm using only magnetic torquers is proposed. This algorithm has been developed for the atmospheric environment monitoring satellite, which completes the missions of fixed axis rotation and tracking the sun orientation. Firstly, a Lyapunov function, combining the angular momentum error and angular velocity, is formulated and a new sun-pointing attitude control scheme is derived. Then, it is proved that the magnetic control law is asymptotically stable in the absence of disturbance torques. The proposed method is compared with a state-of-the-art fault-tolerant magnetic spin stabilizing controller design method by numerical simulations. Simulation results show that the proposed method has better performance than the state-of-the-art technique. Finally, the applicability and effectiveness of the proposed control method are demonstrated by the hardware-in-the-loop simulation of the satellite.