Cubesat, Reaction wheel, attitude control, Cubesat missions, miniaturized satellites.

In this thesis, attitude control of a cubesat in a single axis by means of a reaction wheel with fuzzy control is investigated.A cubesat is a type of miniature satellite for space research that usually has a volume of exactly one liter (10 cm x 10 cm x 10 cm) and a mass of approximately 1 kilogram which is called 1-Unit or 1U shortly.Although cubesats are introduced for only academic purposes in recent years, they have various missions such as taking photo from space, earthquake detection, detection of cosmic dust, climatology purposes like prediction of rain and tornado, ect today.Many academic papers on the methods and techniques for attitude control are researched during this study and related information about these are given in the literature survey part.In this master thesis main interest is concentrated on the attitude control of a Cubesat in a single axis by the application of the reaction wheel.In this study, the reaction wheel itself and the testbed are designed, implemented and manufactured. The testbed is designed for simulating the behavior of the cubesat in a single axis. The reaction wheel and the testbed are integrated in such a way that all measurements and tests are carried out using this compact system.ivA MATLAB based fuzzy control software together with an Arduino Mega microprocessor is developed and applied to the system as the control method.