A new design of high precision solar microsensor for satellite aplications

This paper shows the design and calibration of an improved miniaturized two-axis sun sensor for satellite attitude control. The proposed new structure is based on a previous sun sensor structure by adding multiple sensing cells. The improvement in precision is obtained by the subdivision of field of view (FoV), which is expected to be ±60°, with a resolution of 0.1°. In the paper, both the mathematical model and the experimental results are presented. The resulting device will be incorporated in Microsat satellite from INTA, which will be launched in 2012.