Over the past few years, a new satellite’s standard is getting more and more popular in the space industry. This one, denominated as CubeSat is particularly appreciated in universities and educational institutions. Indeed, the affordable price of these nanosatellites compared with bigger spacecraft contribute to facilitate access to space and allow students to work on their own satellite.
Being part of this movement, the Birdy-T project’s objective is to open the CubeSat industry to interplanetary missions. In order to do that, the focus is placed on developing an autonomous navigation system. This one would enable the spacecraft to control its orbit as well as its attitude, thus minimize the communication between the satellite and the ground, and as a result considerably reduce the operation costs.
The aim of this thesis is to simulate the Birdy-T’s technology in a programming language called python. We want to code Birdy-T’s attitude and orbit control as well as identify the information exchanged by the different objects involved in these processes. The first results obtained with this simulation will be presented in this document.

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