Spacecraft Attitude Dynamics For Undergraduates

Teaching spacecraft attitude dynamics to undergraduate students is a challenging proposition. The subject has a hefty mathematical base that poses a significant challenge to many aerospace engineering undergraduate students. The challenge for the instructor is to provide a course where students can begin to build their intuition and give them tools to predict how spacecraft behave in space, without the force of gravity. Building this intuition is difficult since the gravity environment is the one we are all most familiar with. In addition, the three dimensional nature of spacecraft adds an additional challenge, as working with matrices and matrix equations are a must. At Embry-Riddle, the students taking this class have had some introduction to spacecraft attitude dynamics in a brief way in a spacecraft systems course. The course on spacecraft attitude dynamics is meant to give the students depth in attitude dynamics and control that they don’t get in the introductory material given in other courses. The students use what they learn in this course in their spacecraft design course, which is taken simultaneously. This paper outlines both the tools used in the classroom to help the students visualize the dynamics and the scope of subject matter that help make the course accessible to the undergraduate student. Matlabœ is used extensively in the course to make the computations less of an obstacle and to enable visualization.