Establishment of the Ground Testing Environment for Verification and Integration of Micro-satellite

摘要

The Space Robotics Laboratory of Tohoku University has three 50kg Micro-satellite projects. The first satellite “SPRITE-SAT” has been successfully launched into Earth orbit, and also been operated. The flight model of the second satellite “RISING-2” has been assembled and its software development is now finalized, being ready for the launch planned in the next year. The third satellite “RISESAT” project is during the Engineering Model (EM) development phase at the time of writing. Some micro-satellites can repair its software by batch file on orbit however most of it is not able to repair its basic software and system-configuration after launch. Therefore, it needs to be evaluated about its system that includes software and hardware in detail. The Space Robotics Laboratory (SRL) of Tohoku University aims to establish a verification environment for micro-satellites system through the RISESAT project. SRL named it as MEVIµS: Model-based Environment for Verification and Integration of µ-Satellite. MEVIµS system has some software and hardware. Its software simulates orbit and satellite environment such as solar power, thermal environment, attitude information and operation of equipment. Its hardware establishes interfaces between simulator and equipment of real-satellite. SRL is planning to establish an environment of hardware-in-the-loop-simulation (HILS) for RISESAT by MEVIµS and RISESAT-EM. RISESAT-EM will be evaluated by its HILS system and its software and hardware of equipment will update continuously until flight model development phase. The paper will show detail of MEVIµS configuration and result of application to RISESAT-EM.