This paper presents a novel observer for attitude estimation based on a triad of high-grade rate gyros aided by a body-fixed vector measurement of a constant inertial vector, departing from the majority of solutions that consider at least two of these vectors. A cascade approach is proposed, where the first block estimates a vector that is related to the angular velocity of the Earth and a second block estimates the attitude. While the topological characteristics are relaxed in the attitude observer so that global exponential stability is achieved, an additional stage is also devised that yields estimates directly on the special orthogonal group, preserving global convergence of the estimation error. Simulation results with realistic sensor noise were performed, including extensive Monte Carlo runs. These results illustrate the convergence of the proposed solution, as well as the achievable performance and robustness to sensor noise.