A Guide to Magnetorquers for Satellites

Re:A Guide to Magnetorquers for Satellites by penagwin on Friday August 23, 2019 @11:59AM (#20778913)

Really interesting wikipedia article on them too (the article borrows from it a bit).

This is really amusing to me:

> The Michigan Exploration Laboratory (MXL) suspects that the M-Cubed CubeSat, a joint project run by MXL and JPL, became magnetically conjoined to Explorer-1 Prime, a second CubeSat released at the same time, via strong onboard magnets used for passive attitude control, after deploying on October 28, 2011.[5] This is the first non-destructive latching of two satellites.[6]

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Re:A Guide to Magnetorquers for Satellites by somesortofsystm on Friday August 23, 2019 @12:44PM (#20779423)

Honestly .. now I need to know about the first destructive latching of satellites more than anything else on HN today ..

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Re:A Guide to Magnetorquers for Satellites by erigeron on Friday August 23, 2019 @01:30PM (#20780098)

Check out the Kosmos-2251/Iridium-33 collision. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_satellite_collision

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Re:A Guide to Magnetorquers for Satellites by kartikkumar on Friday August 23, 2019 @01:40PM (#20780226)

TS Kelso at AGI put out an interesting white paper with more details: https://www.agi.com/resources/white-papers/analysis-of-the-i...

Kelso is also the brains behind CelesTrak for debris tracking: https://www.celestrak.com

There are also a number of videos on YouTube of the collision profile, made using AGI's Systems Toolkit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7oRC9dHKI9Y

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Re:A Guide to Magnetorquers for Satellites by perl4ever on Friday August 23, 2019 @11:23PM (#20785017)

I'm unclear what "at a speed of" means. Is this relative velocity or just how fast they were both orbiting? Why phrase it this way, I wonder.

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