The Hardware System Design Of CMOS Star Sensor

Star sensor is a high-precision, high reliability attitude measurement equipment of astronomical navigation system. As the satellite miniaturization and autonomous navigation technology developing, the hardware and software in star sensor is improved very quickly.First this paper introduces the basic theory and the structure of the star sensor pose-ascertaining system. Then the performance of the key devices CMOS image sensor STAR250 in the system is analyzed deeply. At the base of the analysis, we complete the hardware design of a high-precision, low cost, low power CMOS star sensor combining the application requirements.Major studies of the hardware design are the FPGA design. It consists of four parts: 1. According to the timing requirements of STAR250 image sensor, we have designed a reasonable timing-driven circuit.2. A simple and effective asynchronous parameter register circuit is designed. It can effectively prevent the occurrence of a metastable state and enable the system be able to flexibly adjust the integration time, gain and other parameters in order to achieve the best effect of the images.3. A reliable asynchronous FIFO peripheral circuit is also designed for star data transmission.4. In view of the characteristics of the star images, the subpixel positioning algorithm hardware design of the star objects is studied.The experimental results show that the hardware design of the star sensor is high-performance.