INTERFERENCE ELEMENT, SOLAR SENSOR BASED ON IT, AND METHOD FOR DETERMINING DIRECTION VECTOR TO SUN Russian patent published in 2024 - IPC G01C21/24 

FIELD: space navigation.

SUBSTANCE: invention can be used to quickly and accurately determine the direction to the Sun. The solar sensor includes a housing, inside of which at least two interference elements are fixed with a longitudinal or transverse arrangement of the image recording system, and a control unit connected to all the interference elements and configured to process the data received from the interference elements. A method for measuring the angular coordinates of the Sun includes placing a solar sensor, including at least two interference elements, on-board of a spacecraft, providing illumination by the Sun of the external surfaces of the interference elements, then capturing images of the inner surface of the interference element base with camera lenses and forming these images on the corresponding matrix radiation receivers each interference element, sending digitized images from the outputs of the matrix radiation receivers to the solar sensor control unit. Then the presence of one or two stripes in the images is determined and the images containing one or two stripes are processed to obtain unit vectors of normals to the half-planes in which the centre of the Sun is located, for each interference element in the coordinate system of the solar sensor, from which a unit direction vector is determined Sun.

EFFECT: improved accuracy of determining the direction to the Sun to units of arcseconds or tenths of arcseconds.

13 cl, 15 dwg