Attitude Modes Overview

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For the complete documentation index, see llms.txt.

Attitude is how your spacecraft is oriented in space at any given moment. The platform organizes orientation around attitude modes — named configurations that describe which way your spacecraft points and why. Use this page to understand what an attitude mode is, how body axes and targets fit together, and how the workspace catalog of modes feeds every spacecraft you operate.

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What Is an Attitude Mode

An attitude mode is a named configuration that determines how your spacecraft orients itself relative to the world around it. Each mode answers two questions: which axis on your spacecraft is the primary pointing direction, and what target should that axis follow. Different mission phases demand different orientations:

• Imaging passes require the camera-bearing face to point at the ground.
• Solar charging requires the panels to face the Sun.
• Communication windows require an antenna to track a ground station.
• Thermal management requires a radiator to face cold space, away from the Sun or the Earth.
• Safe-mode recovery requires the spacecraft to stop active control and let its dynamics settle.

You assign one mode at a time to your spacecraft. As mission needs change, you switch modes — either by editing the default mode or by scheduling a transition for a specific time window. The platform handles the rest: computing the orientation, exposing it on plots and exports, and using it consistently across all downstream features.

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The Five Pre-Installed Modes

Every workspace ships with five attitude modes already in the catalog, ready to use on day one. You can edit, rename, or delete any of them — they behave identically to modes you create yourself, with the same dialogs, the same fields, and the same delete confirmation. Each pre-installed mode is fully editable. You can rename Earth-pointing to “Imaging” if that matches your mission language, change which body axis it points with, or delete it entirely if your mission doesn’t use it.

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Body Axes

Your spacecraft has its own internal coordinate system, defined relative to its physical geometry. The platform refers to the six directions along that coordinate system as body axes: Body axes are anchored to the spacecraft itself — they rotate with it. When you say “point the +X body axis at the Sun,” you are telling the platform: take the face of your spacecraft that corresponds to the +X direction, and keep it aimed at the Sun, no matter how the spacecraft moves through its orbit. The exact physical face each axis represents depends on how you described your spacecraft’s geometry. The X, Y, and Z dimensions you entered when creating your spacecraft define the body frame the platform uses for every attitude calculation. If your camera sits on the +Z face and your antenna sits on the -Y face, you reference those faces using +Z and -Y when configuring modes. When you configure a mode, you choose:

• A primary body axis — the face that must point at the primary target.
• A secondary body axis — the face that resolves the remaining rotational degree of freedom by pointing at, or away from, a secondary target.

Together, the primary and secondary axis assignments fully determine the orientation of your spacecraft.

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Target Types

A target tells the platform what each chosen body axis should track. Targets fall into three families, each with its own behaviour over time.

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Celestial Body

A celestial body is something whose position the platform computes from astronomical models. The available bodies include:

• Sun — used by Sun-pointing modes, and by anything that needs solar reference.
• Moon — useful for Moon-relative observation or Moon-aware thermal control.
• Earth nadir — the geodetic point on Earth directly below your spacecraft, used by Earth-pointing modes.

Celestial-body targets move continuously through the inertial frame, and the platform tracks them dynamically. Your chosen body axis stays locked on the target as the geometry evolves throughout the orbit.

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Ground Station

A ground station is a fixed geographic point on Earth’s surface — a real antenna site, a calibration target, or any location described by latitude and longitude. Ground stations don’t move in the Earth-fixed frame, but they sweep through the inertial frame as the planet rotates. As your spacecraft moves through its orbit and the Earth rotates beneath it, the platform updates the geometry continuously so your chosen body axis stays aimed at the station.

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Fixed Inertial Direction

A fixed inertial direction is a point on the celestial sphere identified by its right ascension and declination in degrees. Use this when you want to point at a star, a fixed beacon, a calibration source, or any direction that does not move with Earth, the Sun, or your spacecraft. The direction stays locked in the inertial frame; the platform handles the rotation needed to keep your chosen body axis aimed at that point as the spacecraft orbits.

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Which Modes Use Which Targets

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The Workspace Catalog

The platform maintains a single shared attitude mode catalog for each workspace. Every mode you see anywhere in the platform — whether you are editing a default mode, scheduling a transition, or browsing the modes list — comes from this one catalog. A few principles follow from that:

• Every mode is editable. You can rename any mode, change its targets, change its body-axis assignments, or update its description. There is no protected subset.
• Every mode is deletable. Any mode you no longer need can be removed using the same delete confirmation as any other. Deleting a mode that is currently active or scheduled will prompt you to choose a replacement first.
• Every mode is a full citizen. The five pre-installed modes use the same dialog, the same fields, and the same affordances as the modes you create yourself. There are no badges, labels, colors, or icons that distinguish a pre-installed mode from one you authored.
• Every spacecraft draws from the same catalog. When you assign a default mode or schedule a transition for any spacecraft in the workspace, the picker shows the same set of modes. Edits you make to a mode propagate everywhere the mode is referenced.

This unified model means you can curate one canonical set of orientations for your operation and reuse them across your fleet, without duplicating configuration per spacecraft.

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Default Mode and Transitions

Each spacecraft has exactly one default attitude mode. The default is the orientation the spacecraft holds whenever no scheduled transition is currently active — think of it as the fallback the spacecraft falls back to between operations. On top of the default, you can schedule attitude transitions: time-anchored switches that override the default for a specific window. A scheduled transition activates at its transition time and remains active until the next scheduled transition (or until you remove it, in which case the default resumes). The flow is simple:

• No transitions scheduled: the spacecraft holds the default mode at all times.
• One transition scheduled at time T: the spacecraft holds the default before T and switches to the scheduled mode at T.
• Multiple transitions: the spacecraft switches at each transition time in order; the default fills any gap before the first transition.

For details on scheduling, editing, and removing transitions, see Schedule attitude transitions.

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