Geomagnetic Field Tracker for Deorbiting a CubeSat Using Electric Thrusters

What is it about?

Space junk is becoming one of the main concerns within the aerospace community, as the number of man made objects orbiting Earth is continuously increasing, many of them without any kind of control remaining. At the same time, nanosatellites, specially CubeSats, are gaining a lot of popularity, and they are being launched in large numbers, and there are even some megaconstellations of this satellites being planned. Therefore, there exist the concern that they can have a negative impact in the space junk problem, as they usually lack means for deorbiting at the end of their mission. We propose a simple and efficient orientation tracking algorithm for deorbiting CubeSats, making use of recently developed electric thrusters.

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