Establishment of the Ground Testing Environment for Verification and Integration of Micro-satellite

Tomioka, Y.; Fukuda, Kazuhiko; Sugimura, Nobuo; Sakamoto, Yuji; Kuwahara, Toshinori; Yoshida, Kazuya

doi:10.2322/tastj.12.tf_33

Cited by 9 publications

(8 citation statements)

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“…SRL has been developing a software-assisted development, verification, and integration environment for microsatellites to realize rapid and cost-effective development of reliable microsatellite systems. 8) Based on the abovementioned analysis and experimental measurements, the software model of the Earth sensor has been developed and implemented in this simulation environment for ground testing. This simulation environment is comprehensive and is capable of hardware-inthe-loop simulation with satellite components such as attitude control computers, as illustrated in Fig.…”

Section: System Simulation Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Design and Implementation of a Thermopile-Based Earth Sensor

Kuwahara

Fukuda

Sugimura

et al. 2016

AEROSPACE TECHNOLOGY JAPAN

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In recent years, microsatellites have attracted great attention for their low cost, rapid development, and utilization capability. Demand for more requirements is increasing, and reliable attitude control is indispensable for secure operation. An Earth sensor is typically used to detect the direction of Earth's center relative to the spacecraft's attitude. Unlike Sun sensors, an Earth sensor can be functional even in the eclipse region in orbit, which enables a spacecraft to determine its attitude regardless of orbital position. The thermopile-based Earth sensor developed in this research is designed to have full sky coverage, i.e., it is operational independent of satellite attitude. Therefore, it can be used in safe-hold-mode operation. As a result of this research, an Earth sensor is realized by utilizing multiple thermopile sensors. The geocentric vector can be determined from the output voltages of thermopiles that are mounted on the entire satellite in a distributed manner and pointed in different directions. In order to establish a data processing algorithm, the output voltage and angle characteristics of the sensors were investigated analytically and experimentally. A numerical model of the sensor was developed, and its performance in orbit was evaluated in a software-based simulation and verification environment.

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Section: System Simulation Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Design and Implementation of a Thermopile-Based Earth Sensor

Kuwahara

Fukuda

Sugimura

et al. 2016

AEROSPACE TECHNOLOGY JAPAN

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“…14 The body pointing system and its optical ground station tacking algorithms have been evaluated using the Model based Evaluation and Verification for Integration of u-Satellite (MEVIuS) hardware-in-the-loop (HILS) simulator that was developed by SRL. 15…”

Section: Attitude Control Modesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Assembly and integration of optical downlink terminal VSOTA on microsatellite RISESAT

Tomio

Kuwahara²,

Fujita³

et al. 2019

International Conference on Space Optics — ICSO 2018

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The Rapid International Scientific Experiment Satellite (RISESAT) is a 50-kg-class Earth observation microsatellite that is currently being developed at the Space Robotics Laboratory (SRL) of Tohoku University, with a planned launch data in 2018. Intended to demonstrate a cost-effective and reliable microsatellite bus system, RISESAT features various scientific payload instruments from institutions and organizations around the world. Among the payloads are the Very Small Optical Transponder (VSOTA), a compact, dual-band (980 nm, 1550 nm), lightweight laser signal transmitter developed by the Japanese National Institute for Information and Communications Technology (NICT), and the High Precision Telescope (HPT), a multi-spectral, high-resolution Cassegrain telescope developed by Hokkaido University and intended for Earth and astronomical observations. Using these two payloads, RISESAT can demonstrate satellite-toground one-way laser communication. This experiment is intended to demonstrate optical communication capability within the scope of the available hardware resources on a microsatellite dedicated to numerous other scientific endeavors. Hence, VSOTA is lighter, less power intensive, and more simplified than other optical transmitter terminals. Internal gimbal mechanisms for fine pointing have also been eliminated, thus the tracking of the optical ground stations will be achieved using body pointing of the satellite. Recently, end-to-end electrical configuration and communication tests have been conducted for both the engineering model (EM) and the flight model (FM) of the VSOTA assembly. This paper provides an overview of VSOTA and its space-to-ground optical communication demonstration, and describes the current status of the RISESAT optical communication subsystem assembly and integration.

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“…[5][6][7] The development and upgrading of the ground evaluation simulator are important research topics. 8) The attitude motion and estimated sensor outputs are calculated by the ground computer, and the dummy outputs are supplied to the flight hardware. By this hardware-in-the-loop simulation (HILS) process, the validity of the onboard software can be evaluated correctly.…”

Section: Pre-flight Evaluation For Bus Subsystemsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Development and Flight Results of Microsatellite Bus System for RISING-2

Sakamoto

Sugimura

Fukuda

et al. 2016

AEROSPACE TECHNOLOGY JAPAN

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The RISING-2 microsatellite was launched in May 2014 into a sun-synchronous circular orbit at a height of 628 km. This paper describes the operation results and the flight evaluation of bus system. The satellite was successful in obtaining images of Earth using a high-resolution multi-spectral telescope system with a 5-m spatial resolution in red-green-blue (RGB) observations and 10-m resolution in spectral observations. The weight of the satellite is 43.2 kg, and the shape is almost cubic, with sides 50 cm in length. The satellite has an attitude control system that uses three-axis reaction wheels, which enables a nadir-pointing mode and a target-pointing mode in tracking a specified ground location. The attitude actuators and sensors are magnetic coils, star sensors, gyro sensors, sun sensors, magnetometers, and a global positioning system (GPS) receiver. The satellite attitude could be determined with an error of less than 0.005° from observation images. Using coarse determination methods employing magnetometers, sun sensors, and gyro sensors, the pointing angle error was determined to be 1.9 deg in root mean square (RMS), and the direct distance error was determined to be 21.5 km in RMS.

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Establishment of the Ground Testing Environment for Verification and Integration of Micro-satellite

Cited by 9 publications

References 0 publications

Design and Implementation of a Thermopile-Based Earth Sensor

Design and Implementation of a Thermopile-Based Earth Sensor

Assembly and integration of optical downlink terminal VSOTA on microsatellite RISESAT

Development and Flight Results of Microsatellite Bus System for RISING-2

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