A Miniaturized Micro-Digital Sun Sensor by Means of Low-Power Low-Noise CMOS Imager

A digital sun sensor is superior to an analog sun sensor in aspects of resolution, albedo immunity, and integration. The proposed micro-digital sun sensor (μDSS) is an autonomous digital sun sensor that is implemented through a CMOS image sensor, which is named active pixel sensor (APS+). The μDSS is designed specifically for micro-satellite application that addresses for low power and high accuracy. The APS+ significantly reduces the power consumption by a profiling method and obtains low noise by a quadruple sampling method. Measurement results show that the μDSS achieves an accuracy of 0.01° with 21 mW at 10 fps, which is ten times less than the state of the art.