Star Detection and Accurate Centroiding for the Geosynchronous Interferometric Infrared Sounder of Fengyun-4A

Extracting accurate star centroids in the observed star images is one of the key problems for image navigation of the geosynchronous interferometric infrared sounder (GIIRS) of Fengyun-4A Satellite (FY-4A), the first scientific experimental satellite of the new generation of Chinese geostationary meteorological satellite Fengyun-4 series. Compared with star sensors which are widely used for star observation, it is challenging to detect the 2×2 star spot from the focused star images of GIIRS and calculate the star centroid in high precision. In this paper, we propose a star detection and centroiding method based on trajectory search and trajectory fitting. Since the launch of FY-4A in December 2016, our centroiding method has been tested in-orbit for over two years. The extensive experiments show that the star centroiding error of our method is less than 0.3 pixels, which makes an important contribution to image navigation of FY-4A.