Attitude Determination of Nanosatellites in the Sun-Eclipse Phases

Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) and extended Kalman filter (EKF) are integrated earlier by authors in order to estimate the satellite's angular motion parameters about center of mass. The SVD-aided EKF algorithm is used in this study for estimation of the attitude angles and angular velocities. In the eclipse period, algorithm is switched into the prediction phase for better attitude estimation of the satellite; therefore, satellite's attitude angles when no data coming from the sun sensor are improved.