Attitude determination module for CubeSat

The increasing interest of medium and small companies in CubeSats is due to their inherent characteristics like low cost, reduced requirements and short term startup of such space missions. New navigation instruments and modules are being designed and manufacturing in order to increase the functionality and performance of this kind of picosatellites. Size, cost and power limits are several of the restrictions applied to design criteria of such instruments. This paper introduces a new hardware module to be used in attitude determination, specially designed for CubeSat missions, and composed by a star tracker and a set of sun sensors. While appropriate sun sensors have been selected from space industry, a new star tracker has been designed and manufactured for this purpose.