Magnetic attitude control system for low-Earth orbit satellites

A small spacecraft (SC) under consideration is intended for performing a scientific mission on the low-Earth orbit for a long time (a year or more). A control system of the SC provides the construction of regime of three-axis orientation of the SC in the orbital coordinate system and the stabilization of that regime, and must be autonomous, low-weight and low-cost. The magnetic control system that consists of the information subsystem based solely on three-axis magnetometer measurings and the magnetic actuators satisfies in the best way requirements mentioned above. Such system can estimate both orbital motion parameters and attitude ones of the SC. But the absence of the additional instruments and damping devices complicates the estimation since the range of initial conditions uncertainly is wide and the problem of estimating becomes essentially nonlinear. To get over these difficulties a recursive state estimation algorithm with enhanced convergence is proposed. The magnetic control moment is synthesized by the vector function Lyapunov method.