Field of View and Accuracy Improvement of a Coarse Sun Sensor

Sun Sensors are important devices used for attitude determination of spacecrafts and Sun direction determination during possible safe-modes. Coarse Sun Sensors (CSS) are popular due to their simplicity and low cost. A typical CSS consists of photodiodes (or other analog photo-sensitive elements) mounted other on the faces of the spacecraft or a four-faces pyramid. This paper argues for a pyramidal configuration of CSS as well as for increasing the number of faces. In this work, optimal angles for the pyramid faces are presented, and the optimization algorithm is discussed.