Design of an ADCS testing facility for nanosatellite

Nowadays any satellite needs to undergo testing before being launched into orbit, in order to ensure its performances at full capacity during the entire mission and to make safe investments. The satellite design phase establishes for each satellite's subsystem the verification tests that must be passed to validate its functioning. Among them, the attitude control and determination system is one of the most complicated to validate, mainly due to the complexity to simulate the correct working environment. For this reason, we are still looking for alternative reliable methods able to satisfy all the requirements required for this testing, preferably with the possibility to perform it on ground. Recently, the space industry has focused its interest into microsatellites, cheaper and capable to perform tasks that a single satellite would not be able to fulfill. Small satellites attitude control can be especially challenging, since smaller satellites means less volume and mass available for sensors and actuators. Moreover, moments of inertia are very small and thus very low and accurate torques are required. This means high quality and reliable actuator small enough to fit inside the satellite. On the other hand, overcoming these challenges would allow to reduce considerably costs and, thanks to their small size, testing logistics would result easier. Furthermore, they can be easily tested on ground inside a thermal vacuum chamber, ideal environment to test space materials. The aim of this thesis is to study an alternative method to test the attitude control and determination system for CubeSat, in particular with mass less than 10 Kg and size of some tens of centimeters, focusing on reproducing as faithfully as possible the ideal operational conditions.