Design Concept and Development of a New Spherical Attitude Stabilizer for Small Satellites

This paper presents the description, design concept, and dynamics of a new control moment gyroscope with a spherical rotor, referred to here as a spherical stabilizer. This stabilizer can be used as an alternative low-weight and high-precision triaxial attitude control device for small and experimental satellites. The mechanical design, as well as precision and structural analysis of the mechanism, is studied in detail. A numerical example of a specific satellite is presented and a fatigue simulation using the finite element method is carried out to examine the failure behavior of critical parts of the mechanism. The performance of the proposed mechanism as attitude controller of a small satellite is also studied via numerical simulations.