CubeSats enable affordable access to space, making them popular with universities, research institutes, and hobbyists. However, CubeSats still have a relatively high failure rate, particularly for missions with a small budget. In this thesis, we show evidence that insufficient testing is one of the root causes for this. This insufficiency is often caused by a lack of availability, budget, and time for the necessary testing. It would appear that the success chance of similar future missions could be improved by offering more affordable and accessible testing for all.

This thesis presents an open-source, end-to-end design for a magnetic testing system. This system facilitates important validation testing of nanosatellites for less than €12,500. The accompanying Helmholtz Cage Toolkit software allows for the simulation of magnetic field envelopes experienced by a satellite in orbit, which can then be reproduced by the hardware with an average pointing error of a few degrees.