Attitude control system of micro satellite RISING-2

This paper summarizes the attitude control system of the 50-kg micro satellite RISING-2, which is now under development by the Tohoku University and Hokkaido University. The main mission of the RISING-2 is Earth surface observations with 5-m resolution using a Cassegrain telescope with 10-cm diameter and 1-m focal length. Accurate attitude control capability with less than 0.1 deg direction errors and less than 0.02 deg/s angular velocity errors is required to realize this observation. In addition, because of the larger power consumption of the science units than expected, actuators must be operated with sufficiently low power. The attitude control system realizes 3-axis stabilization for the observation by means of star sensors, gyro sensors, sun attitude sensors and reaction wheels. In this paper the attitude control law of the RISING-2 is analyzed to keep the power of reaction wheels under the limit. This simulation is based on component specifications and also includes noise data of the components which are under development. The simulation results show that the pointing error is less than 0.1 deg in most time with the RISING-2 attitude control system.