Simulation study on star pair angular separation measurement error estimation using star images acquired by low-cost star trackers

For star images obtained by star sensors, how to precisely and quickly estimate the measurement accuracy of angular distance between different magnitude stars still remains a challenge problem. In this paper, on the basis of analyzing the standard deviation of star centroid position bias, a theoretical measurement accuracy determination model of inter-star angles is proposed. However, this method has its limitation and can only be used to help design low-cost star trackers which commonly have small field-of-view (FOV) (no larger than 4° × 4°) Experiments on the simulated star maps show the effectiveness of proposed model.