A spring-loaded P-POD imparts a small, essentially random spin rate to every axis on ejection — the CubeSat leaves the rail tumbling with no control input at all.
A permanent bar magnet only aligns the body with the local field; without a separate dissipative mechanism (hysteresis rods, modeled here as light rotational damping) it would librate forever, so real passive stabilization needs many orbits to settle.
An active magnetorquer runs the classic B-dot law: it measures how fast the local field appears to rotate in the body frame (dB/dt) and drives a magnetic dipole moment m = −k·dB/dt against it, producing torque m×B that pumps rotational energy out directly — detumble in roughly one orbit.
- Longer 2U/3U bodies have an asymmetric inertia tensor, so their tumble is visibly more chaotic (intermediate-axis flipping) than a 1U cube.
- Power and antenna lock only recover once the body is both slow and pointed — a fast-tumbling satellite can't hold a fix even if it happens to cross the right heading.
- This 2D view runs the identical quaternion rigid-body integrator as the 3D version — only the rendering is flattened to a hand-drawn wireframe projection on a plain canvas.