Accurate and Autonomous Star Acquisition Method for Star Sensor under Complex Conditions

Star sensor is a preferred attitude measurement device for its extremely high accuracy. Star acquisition is the essential and critical procedure, which is aiming at acquiring accurate star areas. However, degenerated acquisition results under complex conditions become one of the major restrictions for modern star sensor. In this paper, an accurate and autonomous star acquisition method is proposed. Mathematical morphology and variable thresholding are combined for accurate star extraction; motion PSF is estimated in frequency domain and nonlinear filter is adopted for star restoration. Accurate star acquisition can be achieved based on only one star image. Simulations and laboratory experiments are conducted for verification. Several existing methods are also reproduced for comparison. Acquisition results demonstrate that the proposed method is effective and an excellent performance can be achieved autonomously under complex conditions, along with more detected stars and improved acquisition accuracy.