All-sky Near-infrared Star Identification

The atmospheric background light and the aerodynamic environment are the main challenges for star sensors utilizing visible light, which may cause missing stars or false stars. Additionally, high-speed maneuvering may result in star trailing, which reduces the accuracy of the star position. To address the issues above, an all-sky near-infrared (NIR) star identification method is proposed to handle position noise, false stars, and missing stars. Different from existing methods based on visible light, the proposed method employs NIR star angular distance to generate indexing, which is applied to build a database. The attitude is calculated and frequency is counted to match. In this work, the proposed method is validated in simulation. Compared with the state-of-the-art, the identification rate is improved by 6%-59.9%, and the solving time is reduced by 13.7%-89.5% under different disturbing.