Solar panels can also be used as coarse sun sensors to increase the pico-satellite system’s redundancy and reliability. This flexible setup is easily sensitive to surrounding light sources as it sees the whole sky, so with the interference of Earths albedo light, it does not show a high accuracy. To improve the performance of satellite attitude measurement in this specific situation, a modified attitude determination method was investigated. According to the actual output of solar panel with the interference of albedo light, the Wahbas problem was re-discussed, and a new loss function for optimal attitude determination was proposed. Also the method to solve the optimal weighted leastsquare function was developed. From simulation, compared with the classic quaternion estimator (QUEST), which is based on Wahbas loss function, the suggested attitude determination method, which is based on the new loss function, shows higher accuracy. Monte Carlo simulation shows that the average attitude error of the suggested method is 17% lower than QUEST, and the standard deviation is 57% lower as well.
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