## 1 Introduction
Further, they proposed an error evaluation method for the measurement system, and the novel methods were proved by experiments. [PERSON] et al. [PERSON] et al. (2016) presented a test method to determine the moment of inertia of a motor vehicle. A test platform was designed and the measurement error of the test platform was analyzed. [PERSON] et al. [PERSON] et al. (2016) presented a novel method to identify the moment of inertia and centroid of a rigid body applied to the work-energy principle. They proposed methods to process data and estimate system error. [PERSON] et al. (2016) designed a method to estimate the inertia for space debris. This method consisted of three phases: coarse and precise estimate of mass and estimate of the moments of inertia. [PERSON] et al. [PERSON] et al. (2016) investigated three common measurement methods of moments of inertia and presented a new method to evaluate measurement error. The results of the analysis show that the bifilar torsional pendulum method has a lower error than other methods. [PERSON] (2016) designed and optimized a mass property measurement system; therein, the air bearing and flexure applied to the measurement system greatly improve the measurement accuracy. [PERSON] (2016) presented a new method for designing the optimal excitation of identifying inertia parameters, and the simulation results showed that the calculated optimal excitation has a good performance index and can produce accurate identification results even when some perturbations are considered. [PERSON] (2016) theoretically and experimentally investigated the effects of disturbances on the inertia measurement system. The disturbances could be eliminated via some solutions to improve measurement accuracy. However, the above measurement algorithm and methodology mainly involve common measurement procedures for mass characteristics, and the measurement of centroid position can be achieved via three point weighting, suspension, and balancing method. There are three main safe and popular methods to measure the moment of inertia: period of free oscillation, torque, and pendulums methods [PERSON] et al. (2016); [PERSON] (2016); [PERSON] (2016). However, there are several drawbacks to implementing these methods. They must use different machines to measure the centroid and moment of inertia, and in addition, the test body must be clamped many times and different fixture tools must be used when measuring the mass characteristics of different directions, and the high precision sensors must be used and a large number of test data need to be collected and processed; hence, those measurement methods are of high risk to the product, expensive, and time consuming. Hence, this paper proposes a new measurement method for determining mass characteristics, and the feasibility of this test method is proved by using a dynamic simulation and an experimental analysis method. A summary of the paper is shown in Figure 1. The measurement system for determination of the mass characteristics is designed and developed, and through a number of standard workpiece tests, the deviation of the measurement system and effective compensation methods of the mass characteristics are obtained. The measurement system and compensation methods are applied to measure the mass characteristics of a pico-satellite. In addition, the measurement system not only improves the accuracy of the centroid and moment of inertia determination of the pico-satellite, but it also has several advantages, such as a simple operation, high efficiency, small volume, and low cost.