A new kind of miniature sun sensor design

This paper presents the design of a new type of digital sun sensors which can be applied to micro spacecraft especially micro satellites. The optical system, which adopts the CMOS APS area array sensor while abandoning the traditional way of utilizing slot to achieve the introduction of sun light, is different from common systems. The uniqueness of the design lies in the perpendicular double-slit structure. By windowing image reading through software settings of the sensor, we can obtain the obliquity of light relative to two axes thus calculating the actual sun light angle. Since there is no need to read the image information of the entire area array, this design can significantly increase the data updating frequency with no loss of data accuracy.