Simple Attitude Control

Project information

This project considers a small satellite in a low altitude orbit around Mars gathering science data. The goal of this project is to design a thruster-based attitude control to achieve certain attitudes that allow pointing sensor platform down at Mars for data gathering, pointing the solar arrays at the sun for recharging batteries, and pointing communication platform at the mother satellite to transfer gathered data to a larger mother satellite at a higher altitude.

In all scenarios the small spacecraft and mother craft are on simple circular orbits whose motion is completely known. A PD control law is implemented that drives the attitude error and the angular velocity errors to zero.

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