Triange meshes are widely used in representing surfaces in computer vision and computer graphics. Although a lot of work related to 2D image processing based on edge extraction techniques has been done in many applications

it is not well developed to extract the border of surfaces represented by triangle meshes

especially the visible border along on vector. A detection algorithm of visible mesh borders is presented in the paper. The visibility of a triangle facet in the mesh is determined by the relation between its normal vector and the ray direction. The type of a triangle facet is defined by the number of its visible edges

and it includes 0-type

1-type

2-type and 3-type. The visible border is detected according the triangles' typ2. The algorithm's time complextity is O(n). Experimental results demonstrated the feasibility and validity of the algorithm. This algorithm is applied in the shelter calculation for the solar arrays of the satellite configuration analysis. And the requirements on computing velocity and accuracy for engineering application are met completely.