A new guide star selection algorithm for star tracker

The purpose of this paper is to generate a near uniform guide star catalog (GSC), which has minimum number of guide stars and covers the whole celestial sphere. Minimum Boltzmann entropy (MBE) has been used as criteria to select or reject a star from candidate stars inside field of view (FOV). As an example, a GSC with 14/spl deg/ /spl times/ 14/spl deg/ squared FOV and visual magnitude threshold (VMT) 6.0 was demonstrated. In order to value the uniformity of GSC, we compared the GSC to initial candidate star catalog (ICSC) and the random simulation star catalog (RSSC). It shows the GSC generated by MBE from ICSC has a better uniformity property for both local and global.