Refraction Surface-Based Stellar Atmospheric Refraction Correction and Error Estimation for Terrestrial Star Tracker

Stellar atmospheric refraction imaging error, as the optical imaging variation of starlight before and after passing through Earth’s atmosphere, is one of the key issues for terrestrial star trackers to obtain accurate attitude measurement results. To resolve the problem, a refraction surface-based stellar atmospheric refraction correction method is presented in this paper. Different from existing correction methods, a new atmospheric refraction feature, i.e., stellar atmospheric refraction surface, is proposed to represent the random irregular optical phenomena of starlight, and avoids the limitations of theoretical atmospheric models and empirical formulas. On the basis of the principles of “collinear refraction surfaces”, “invariable refraction surface”, the proposed model successfully realizes the accuracy atmospheric refraction correction by the sensor itself, without external atmospheric parameters. Then, by analyzing the error factors parallel and perpendicular to the atmospheric refraction surface, the atmospheric refraction correction error estimation model is established to forecast the attitude accuracy after correction. Numerical simulations and night sky experiments validate the reliability of our atmospheric refraction correction method and error estimation model. The average angular distance error of the test star tracker is reduced from
$31.1310''$
into
$1.7705''$
, which is significantly decreased by 94.31%.