Coarse Sun Acquisition for Micro Satellites Using only Sun Sensors

摘要

This paper formulated an algorithm for coarse sun acquisition with sunsensors, specifically for the case of microsatellites. In contrast to a largersatellite, a microsatellite has limited power and thus generally lacks afunctional attitude estimator in the launching stage. After the detumblingstage, the microsatellite must acquire the sun’s position as soon as possibleusing the designated algorithm. This paper presents the development of analgorithm for the blind search of the sun’s position in the case where onlycoarse sun sensors are used. We also considered the case of a solar eclipse. Amodel with 6 degrees of freedom was developed for a Monte Carlo simulationto verify the developed algorithm. The developed algorithm can be used inany microsatellite with similar equipment.