In recent years, micro and mini satellites have gained significant attention from the Aerospace community, due to their relatively low construction and exploitation costs and short response times (from contract to orbit). The on-going research at ICLab on small satellites focuses on the dynamics of small satellites with passive and semi-passive orientation systems.

This project unifies a number of problems of stabilisation and control of the attitude motion of a satellite and can lead to some results, useful for space industry.

The ConSat project is carried out by two portuguese universities: Instituto Superior Técnico (of Universidade Técnica de Lisboa) and Universidade da Beira Interior.

ISR/IST participation is focussed on the following

Objectives:

• Optimisation in orientation precision of the attitude control algorithm of PoSAT-1 and expansion of realisable manoeuvres;



• optimal change of orientation of the satellite for more general type of control torque.