A testbed for small satellites technologies

Ground tests play a key role in verifying many critical aspects of a spacecraft mission, even within the current trend of high fidelity simulation tools. In fact numerical runs of complex maneuvers still need some realistic indications of the expected system’s behaviour to better define model assumptions. To this aim different test-beds have been recently built at the Guidance and Navigation Laboratory of Sapienza - Università di Roma. They share, for reasons of costs and complexity, the limitation of a bi-dimensional representation of the space gravity-less environment. Nevertheless, they allowed to better investigate complex dynamics’ phenomena typical to space activities, and a number of interesting indications have been provided by these experimental tests. Among the different realizations there are robotic arms equipped with different endeffectors, a self-standing floating platform representing a spacecraft bus (also able to perform rendezvous or re-orientation manoeuvres) and a scaled simulator for image-based navigated and controlled formation-flying. The paper is intended to present the main characteristics of these test-beds and to discuss their performance and the related research activities.