Advanced Attitude Sensors for Microsatellites and Nanosatellites

This paper describes the research activities undertaken at the University of Naples for the development and test of advanced attitude sensors for microsatellites and nanosatellites applications. In particular, a stellar-inertial sensor and a miniature digital sun sensor are described in the paper. Both sensors are being developed for autonomous attitude determination with high accuracy. The stellar-inertial sensor is obtained by the fusion of MEMS inertial rate sensors with an advanced star sensor based on Kalman filtering. The miniature sun sensor relies on a CMOS Photodetector covered by a MEMS mask with one or more tiny holes. The paper describes sensors’ operation principle as well as their prototype development and numerical and laboratory test preliminary results