In this article, a three-axis attitude manoeuvre spacecraft consisting of a central rigid body and a rotating solar array is studied. The rotating solar array is considered a disturbance to the spacecraft. In the design of the controller, the coupled terms and the rotating solar array are considered a disturbance. The improved extended state observer is proposed by combing the sliding mode observer with the originally extended state observer to estimate the disturbance. The sliding mode control method is adopted to adjust the attitude of the spacecraft. Numerical simulations are presented to demonstrate the outstanding performance of the present observer.