In order to avoid the high cost and high risk of demonstration mission of rendezvous-docking technology, missions using nanosatellites have recently been increasing. However, there are few successful mission cases due to many limitations of nanosatellites like small size, power limitation, and limited performances of sensor, thruster, and controller. To improve the probability of rendezvous-docking mission success using nanosatellite, a rendezvous-docking phase analysis tool for nanosatellites is developed. The tool serves to analyze the relative position and attitude control of the chaser satellite at the docking phase. In this tool, the Model Predictive Controller (MPC) is implemented as a controller, and Extended Kalman Filter (EKF) is adopted as a filter for noise filtering. To verify the performance and effectiveness of the developed tool for nanosatellites, simulation study was conducted. Consequently, we confirmed that this tool can be used for the analysis of relative position and attitude control for nanosatellites in the rendezvous-docking phase.

In a Satellite communication system, a link budget analysis is the detailed investigation of signal gains and losses moving through a channel from a sender to receiver. It inspects the fading of passed on data signal waves due to the process of spreading or propagation, including transmitter and receiver antenna gains, feeder cables, and related losses. The extent of the proposed tool is to make an effective, efficient, and user-friendly approach to calculate link budget analysis. It is also related to the satellite communication correlation framework by building up a graphical interface link analysis tool utilizing STK® software with the interface of C# programming. It provides better kinds of graphical display techniques, exporting and importing data files, printing link information, access data, azimuth-elevation-range (AER), and simulation is also possible at once. The components of the link budget analysis tool include transmitter gain, effective isotropic radiated power (EIRP), free space loss, propagation loss, frequency Doppler shift, flux density, link margin, elevation plot, etc. This tool can be useful for amateur users (e.g., CubeSat developers in the universities) or nanosat developers who may not know about the RF communication system of the satellite and the orbital mechanics (e.g., orbit propagators) principle used in the satellite link analysis.