To autonomously determine the attitude of a spacecraft by a star sensor without a rate sensor, it is necessary to detect and track stars even when the attitude change rate of the spacecraft, i.e., the body rate, is high. A high body rate causes a motion blur and decreases the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of stars, making stable detection of many stars difficult. In this paper, in order to overcome this difficulty we propose a star detection method using the recursive maximum filter (RMF). Though the RMF was originally proposed for the detection of small moving targets with low SNR from an IR image sequence, we show that it also works well for images from a star sensor. In a star sensor image, both bright and dim stars exist at the same time. In the proposed method, bright stars are detected and masked in each image as a preprocessing step. Then, by applying the RMF to the masked image sequence, the background noise is suppressed and dim stars are gradually enhanced, until at last they can be detected by thresholding. By using this method, the present upper limit of the body rate (1deg/s) for star tracking will be approximately doubled.
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