The vectorial photoelectric effect under solar irradiance and its application to sun sensing

Sun sensors are an integral part of the attitude and orbit control system onboard almost any spacecraft. While the majority of standard analogue sun sensors is based on photo-detectors which produce photo-currents proportional to the cosine of the incidence angle (cosine detectors), we propose an alternative scheme where the vectorial photoelectric effect is exploited to achieve a higher sensitivity of the sensed photo-current to the incidence angle. The vectorial photo-effect is investigated in detail for metal cathode detectors in a space environment. Besides long operational lifetimes without significant degradation, metal cathode detectors are insensitive to earth albedo, which may significantly reduce the errors affecting attitude measurements in low earth orbits. Sensitivity curves are calculated and trade-offs performed with the aim of optimizing the sensitivity whilst also providing currents sufficient for detection. Simple applications and detector configurations are also discussed and compared to the existing designs.