In-Orbit Demonstration of Propellant-Less Formation Flight with Momentum Exchange of Jointed Multiple CubeSats in the MAGNARO Mission

In-Orbit Demonstration of Propellant-Less Formation Flight with Momentum Exchange of Jointed Multiple CubeSats in the MAGNARO Mission

Utah State University, Logan, UT

Recently, small satellites such as CubeSats have been applied to a variety of missions such as scientific observations and remote sensing. One of attractive applications that can be relatively easily achieved by small satellites are multi-satellite missions such as formation flight and constellation. As a new method to realize these multi-satellite missions, we propose a method to separate jointed multiple satellite magnetically to generate ΔV without thrusters. To demonstrate the proposed method, we are developing a 3U sized CubeSat called MAGNARO (MAGnetically separating NAnosatellite with Rotation for Orbit control).