Attitude Control Experiment Design for OPS-SAT Missions

This work presents an innovative attitude control experiment design and a novel application developed for in-orbit testing, leveraging the ESA Nanosat Mission Operations Framework in Java. This application was deployed on OPS-SAT-1, an ESA satellite in orbit until May 2024 which served as a powerful, reconfigurable flying laboratory for experiments. However, the experiment could not be executed on OPS-SAT-1 due to a malfunction in the I2C bus. The main advantage of the presented application is its adaptability for use on any satellite with a similar pointing strategy implementing the Nanosat Mission Operations Framework, which is the Service Oriented architecture that ESA will use in future nanosatellite missions. The experiment design could thus be reused in another satellite. The application incorporates two control algorithms for comparison: an experimental fuzzy controller and an experimental PID controller. However, it can be used to test any type of controller and the general objective of this work is to contribute to the advancement of in-orbit testing and validation of new spacecraft attitude control algorithms.