A New Simplified Selection Algorithm of the Guide Star Catalogue for a Star Sensor

Abstract

A guide star catalogue characterised by fewer guide stars, uniform distribution and high completeness is conducive to the improvement of star pattern identification and star tracking efficiency, and it has become an important study objective. A screening method, which takes "quasi-uniform distribution" of space solid angles as the principle and the size of the space solid angle corresponding to 4°× 4°on the equator as the reference and divided the whole celestial sphere into 2,664 sub-blocks in sequence, is proposed in this paper. Based on this method, a "quasi-uniform" guide star catalogue with 2,937 guide stars was obtained. According to our ergodic statistical analysis of the whole celestial sphere, in a 12°× 12°field of view, after the space solid angle method was used to divide the celestial sphere, the probability of emergence of three guide stars was 99·9% or above, while the number of guide stars decreased by 12·6% compared to the inscribed cube method. It can be concluded that when the completeness is equal, the space solid angle method is superior to the inscribed cube method in both capacity and distribution uniformity. K E Y WO R D S 1. Star Sensor.2. Guide Star Catalogue. 3. Simplified Selection Algorithm.

High-Accuracy Guide Star Catalogue Generation with a Machine Learning Classification Algorithm

“…The ability of an SSR to determine the attitude depends on the existence of an excellent navigation star catalogue. Generally, a preferable star catalogue for navigation is characterised by a lower number of guide stars, a higher completeness, and a much more uniform distribution of the celestial sphere [ 7 ].…”

“…Finally, an evenly and non-overlapping partition of the guide star selection is realised. However, Li et al [ 7 ] pointed out that the solid angles are different in size for each sub-block, especially when the optical axis of the SSR is around the celestial pole. They proposed a novel method to generate a “quasi-uniform” star catalogue, in order to solve the differences in solid angles.…”

Uniform Star Catalogue using GWKM Clustering for Application in Star Sensors

“…Li et al (2014) proposed a method for screening a reference star catalogue and generating a quasi-uniform catalogue in order to improve the performance of the star tracking algorithm. This method is based on patches of equal area (4°×4°), and the celestial sphere was divided into 2,664 subsets.…”