Geometric Modeling and Global Overview of Stabilization Algorithms for a Mexican Picosatellite

The Institute of Engineering UNAM is currently developing all subsystems that comprise a 1 Kg real picosatellite to be sent into space. The work exposed in this paper is based on a previous project which developed the first Mexican didactic satellite (SATEDU) in a fully successful way, [1] and [2]. This paper presents the geometric design made until now, which integrates changes and adjustments required by the picosatellite project. These changes primarily affected the geometry and mass of the subsystems embedded in PCBs, thus the selection and placement of components on PCBs as well as in the structure is essential to accomplish the satellite design. The paper shows the results in terms of inertia matrix, total mass as well as location of the center of mass and principal axes of inertia. These parameters are essential to develop the satellite stabilization algorithms and 3 axes attitude control, from which this article presents the main achievements so far obtained with the help of numerical simulations of a nonlinear controller. Particularly the paper presents satellite attitude stabilization results obtained with Simulink of Matlab and Virtual reality models.