Dynamic smearing compensation method for star centroding of star sensors

Star centroiding results no longer denote initial locations of star centroid because of the smearing effect. This locational error increases significantly when star sensors work in non-uniform rotation cases. Herein, a novel method is proposed to compensate this error. By taking angular acceleration into consideration, a more accurate stellar trajectory model is deduced first, followed by the derivation of compensation formula. Simulation results show that the proposed method can effectively compensate the extracted centroids to their initial locations. The systematic error caused by the proposed method is less than 0.05 pixels when the angular acceleration is 6.0 °/s
²
, which is negligible from engineering perspective.