The Design and Test of a Compact Propulsion System for CanX Nanosatellite Formation Flying

The Design and Test of a Compact Propulsion System for CanX Nanosatellite Formation Flying

The NANOsatellite Propulsion System (NANOPS) is part of the CanX-2 (Canadian Advanced Nanospace eXperiement 2) mission to demonstrate enabling component technologies in support of future formation flying missions. Flight test results in 2006 from NANOPS on board CanX-2 will augment ground test results with the goal of refining the design to support the CanX-4 / CanX-5 formation flying mission in 2008. The CanX-2 NANOPS uses liquefied sulfur hexaflouride (SF6) as a propellant because of its high storage density. The target performance goals are 50 mN of thrust, a specific impulse of 45s. and a minimum impulse bit of 0.0005Ns. The CanX-2 experiement will mainly involve attitude control maneuvers in order to evaluate the performance of the propulsion system through on-board attitude sensors. NANOPS is novel not only because it is the first of its kind in microsatellites based on commercial off-the-shelf components. This paper describes the development metholdology as well as the ground-based and space-based testing involved during the development of NANOPS, and its suitability for future missions.