Stabilization of a spinning spacecraft of arbitrary shape
CA 2000675 C · Owner: Hughes Aircraft Company · Inventors: Rosen, Harold A.
Overview
Its claims, description and drawings are in the Canadian Patents Database.
Open the CIPO recordAbstract From the Canadian patent
A stabilization system for a spacecraft (10) which enables the spacecraft to be stabilized by rotation about any principal moment of inertia axis. The system includes two pairs of control thrusters (14, 16, 18, 20) for producing positive and negative control moments about two orthogonal axes mutually perpendicular to the axis of rotation of the spacecraft. The control system (40) includes rate gyros (42, 46) which provide error signals which are sent to duty cycle modulators (54). The duty cycle modulators provide a pulse width modulated control signal to the control thrusters to approximate proportional control of spacecraft attitude.
Read the whole patent
Listed from its CIPO record in Patent Yard's archive of Canadian patents past their term. Its claims, description and drawings are in the CIPO record and on Google Patents, and the Claude kit works from them.
Why it's free to use
- Filed October 13, 1989 and granted October 25, 1994. A Canadian patent filed from October 1, 1989 lasts 20 years from filing, so its term ended October 13, 2009.
- A certificate of supplementary protection adds at most two years for a drug, so even that would have ended by October 13, 2011.
- We check Canadian rights only. A patent in its family in another country could still be in force: check its family on Google Patents.
Timeline
Timeline From CIPO dates
Sources & verification
Official CIPO records
Everything on this page comes from the CIPO record linked above. Contains information licensed under the Open Government Licence – Canada.