Auto Reconfiguration of Reaction Wheels in IRS

The Indian remote sensing satellite (IRS) employs four reaction wheels for attitude control. The fourth, a skew wheel, provides redundancy to the failure of any of the orthogonal wheels. To avoid attitude loss before the redundant skew wheel takes over due to failure of any of the orthogonal wheels, an automatic reconfiguration scheme has been developed and implemented through a microprocessor. The details of reconfiguration logic and the computer simulation results are presented.