B. Jäger, F.G. Aloisio

Very Low Earth Orbit (VLEO, below 450 km) offers substantial payload benefits for Earth observation and communications but imposes markedly higher demands on the attitude and orbit control system: atmospheric drag orders of magnitude larger than in conventional LEO, strong solar-activity-driven density variation, and physically coupled attitude and orbit dynamics through the shared aerodynamic environment. HAKIV develops a modular, software-defined, MPC-based AOCS spanning the 6U CubeSat to 100 kg SmallSat class to address this coupling. This paper characterizes the VLEO disturbance environment across three satellite classes and the 200-450 km altitude band, and derives disturbance rejection requirements without presupposing specific hardware. Peak torque and thrust, disturbance bandwidth, reaction wheel momentum accumulation, and orbit determination bounded correction cadence are quantified as functions of altitude, satellite class, and solar activity. Torque bandwidth switches between magnetic and aerodynamic dominance at an altitude that itself shifts with solar activity. Orbit correction cadence is bounded not by actuator capability but by orbit determination precision. A scale-invariant aerodynamic stiffness ratio ? compares the aerodynamic lever arm disturbance across platform sizes, complementing a purely geometric radius of gyration normalization and identifying where aerodynamic torque dominates the characteristic inertial-orbital torque scale. These results consolidate into four requirements: peak actuator authority, attitude control bandwidth, reaction wheel desaturation time, and orbit correction cadence with impulse capacity. The paper stops short of an uncertainty quantification of the disturbance environment and of actuator sizing/selection, both left as next steps toward a modular, holistic VLEO AOCS for small satellites.

Deutscher Luft- und Raumfahrtkongress 2026, Aachen

Deutsche Gesellschaft für Luft- und Raumfahrt - Lilienthal-Oberth e.V., Bonn, 2026

Conference Paper

englisch

21,0 x 29,7 cm, 10 Seiten

10.25967/680492

VLEO, AOCS, Disturbance Environment Modeling, Attitude-Orbit Coupling, MPC, Small Satellites

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Jäger, B.; Aloisio, F.G. (2026): HAKIV: A Modular MPC-based AOCS for VLEO. Deutsche Gesellschaft für Luft- und Raumfahrt - Lilienthal-Oberth e.V.. (Text). https://doi.org/10.25967/680492.

30.10.2026