Patent ID: 7552026

Claim:
An active pixel sensor based integrated sun sensor comprising: a diaphragm unit; a detection unit; a processing electronics unit; and an interface unit; wherein the diaphragm unit is operatively connected with the detection unit for forming a sunspots image; and wherein the detection unit is configured for outputting a gray value of each pixel of the sunspots image; wherein the processing electronics unit is operatively connected with the detector unit and the interface unit respectively for evaluating an attitude angle on the basis of the gray value and a coordinate of each pixel of the sunspots image; the processing electronics unit includes an absence detection and identification of a sunspot module configured to detect an absence of a specific sunspot in the sunspots image detected by the detection unit according to sunspots included in the sunspots image; and wherein the interface unit is operatively connected with a host computer for transferring an attitude angle to the host computer.