School of Communication and Information Engineering, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu 610054, Sichuan, China.
Sensors (Basel). 2019 Mar 22;19(6):1424. doi: 10.3390/s19061424.
Non-planar sun sensors can determine solar orientation by existing photodiodes or by reusing solar panels, without increasing the size and mass of spacecraft. However, a limiting factor for the improvement of the accuracy of orientation lies in the lack of a detailed performance assessment on interference suppression. In this paper, a new method that determines solar orientation in the frequency domain is developed for regular pyramid sun sensors, which are formed by regular pyramid arrays. Furthermore, two formulations are established to evaluate the errors of the solar azimuth and elevation angle in solar orientation determination based on the newly proposed frequency-domain method. With these formulations of performance evaluation, we discover the mathematical relationship between the interference spectrum, array geometry, solar irradiance, solar azimuth or elevation angle, and the error in solar orientation determination for the first time. This reveals that the internal interference from the detection system can be completely suppressed in solar orientation determination, and the constant interference can be eliminated in the estimation of solar azimuth angle. Simulation and field experiments validated the effectiveness of the new orientation method, error formulations and performance of each interference source.
非平面太阳敏感器可利用现有的光电二极管或复用太阳能电池板来确定太阳方位，而无需增加航天器的尺寸和质量。然而，提高定向精度的一个限制因素在于缺乏对干扰抑制的详细性能评估。本文为常规角锥型太阳敏感器开发了一种新的在频域确定太阳方位的方法，该角锥型太阳敏感器由规则角锥阵列组成。此外，还建立了两种公式来评估基于新提出的频域方法的太阳方位角和仰角的定向确定误差。通过这些性能评估公式，我们首次发现了干扰谱、阵列几何形状、太阳辐照度、太阳方位角或仰角以及太阳定向确定误差之间的数学关系。这表明，在太阳定向确定中可以完全抑制检测系统的内部干扰，并且可以消除太阳方位角估计中的常数干扰。仿真和现场实验验证了新的定向方法、误差公式和每个干扰源的性能的有效性。
