CubeSat Ground Test Facility as a Tool for Collaborative Hands-On Education: The Joint Experience of the u3s and STAR Laboratories

This manuscript reports on the educational outcomes of a joint initiative from the u3S Laboratory at the University of Bologna and the STAR Laboratory at Politecnico di Torino for a distributed, CubeSat-class attitude determination and control systems testing environment. The u3S laboratory is in charge of the dynamic testbed that hosts the nanosatellites mock-ups developed at the STAR laboratory. The verification campaigns are planned remotely between the students' teams of the two laboratories and culminate with the test execution at the u3S lab premises. Such a collaborative approach is intended to provide the next generation of aerospace engineers with a valuable hands-on training experience in spacecraft attitude control.