I'm kind of curious how the KickSat project achieved regulatory approval back in (2014?) for their Sprites. IIRC there were 100 sprite PCB's released from a Cubesat with a UHF radio and chip solar panels on each sprite.
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/zacinaction/kicksat-you...
Well, you usually need a university address or some endorsers to post to the arxiv, but true, most people could probably post that.
On the other hand, the arxiv is also the default method of communication in quite a few fields (physics and maths, mostly), to the point that while grant committees etc. look at your peer-reviewed papers, I essentially only check the arxiv for new developments, not the plethora of properly peer-reviewed journals.
I looked over that paper, and honestly it is nothing that impressive. Basically it just described applying off-the-shelf algorithms to a particular kind of data. It probably would be published and is interesting to look over, so I don't mean to deride the paper itself, but still it is just not that novel. Nothing about how their end-to-end self driving works or how it's better than the many competitors. So to me this was hugely underwhelming, really.
Two common options are magneto-torque rods that that use the earth's magnetic field or reaction wheels that spin masses up and down to provide torques to provide attitude control. They've documented their attitude systems btw on the site [1] it's magneto-torques and a "spin torquer" which I hadn't heard of but looks like it's another type of magnetic attitude control.
If elkos doesn't answer, according to some research I did, 'reaction wheels' are mostly used for changing attitude, and attitude is measured using either star tracking or sunray angle measurement.
I remember hearing the boom from the STS117 space shuttle in San Diego when it was landing at Edwards back in the summer of the 2007. Shit's loud, even at 100 miles.
