Illumination analysis of spacecraft is very important. This paper firstly introduces the importance of spacecraft illumination analysis in aerospace fields and points out that illumination conditions will influence the design of shape of spacecraft body and the installation of spacecraft equipments. Then, it discusses two methods for analyzing spacecraft solar-panel shadow and illumination conditions: ray tracing illumination algorithm and polyhedral mesh contour edge projection algorithm and compares their efficiency and feasibility. Shadow area and solar area are computed of every cell on solar panels. We designed solar panel single-axis rotation experiment to validate the proposed algorithm. The experimental results show that contour edge projection algorithm has fine accuracy and costs less time. For detailed illumination information, we apply a practical segment clipping algorithm after some comparisons.