Attitude Determination and Control System (ADCS) for CubeSats

ABSTRACT: To overcome the limited Attitude Determination and Control performance of current Cubesats, Blue Canyon Technologies proposes a reliable, high performance design compatible with a variety of cubesat configurations. The BCT FleXible ADCS Cubesat Technology (XACT) architecture leverages a powerful processing core with BCT"s micro-CMG or micro-Reaction Wheel Assemblies to enable a new generation of highly capable, miniaturized spacecraft. As the capacity and speed of modern field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) continue to increase, the number of system functions that can reside within the device are also increasing. The notion of a system on a chip or SOC is now a reality. In this particular application, the SOC is the fleXible ADCS Cubesat Technology (XACT). In order to achieve the topic"s pointing goals within the 1/2 of 1U volume, we are integrating major pieces of the ADC system into a high performance programmable chip. These include star camera image processing and star field solutions, GPS software radio, the BCT PureDriveTM attitude control motor drive, the attitude solution and control processing, and multiple processing cores per chip for asynchronous ADCS function processing. BENEFIT: The Cubesat market is quickly growing. The established area of the market has been focused on the educational benefits of Cubesat design and development. With higher performance, and higher reliability components, Cubesat have the potential for making inroads into the greater than $3 Billion dollar satellite market. In order to take advantage of this market, established contractors must begin to see a match between their desire for a low cost, reliable, and high performance approach and the CubeSat being proposed. The BCT XACT solution will be the first solution that offers the kind of results that contractors need.