A 5DoF compact optical attitude sensor for spaceborne applications

We present a compact optical sensor designed to measure relative attitude and position of remote parts of a satellite (e. g. a boom mounted antenna in a Synthetic Aperture Radar). The sensor is compact and lightweight and makes use of a completely passive target fixed to the object to be measured. The sensor is made of three independent laser based measurement systems respectively for the distance, the lateral translation and pitch and jaw. The passive unit consists in a dichroic mirror coupled to a corner cube mirror. Accuracy of few micrometers and sub-arcsecond resolution have been achieved at distances up to 7.5 m.