A new integration of the acquisition and tracking modes is proposed for the integration of a Celestial Navigation System (CNS) and a Strapdown Inertial Navigation System (SINS). After the integration converges in the acquisition mode, it switches to the tracking mode. In the tracking mode, star pattern recognition is unnecessary and the integration is implemented in a cascaded filter scheme. A pre-filter is designed for each identified star and the output of the pre-filter is fused with the attitude of the SINS in the cascaded navigation filter. Both the pre-filter and the navigation filter are designed in detail. The measurements of the pre-filter are the positions on the image plane of one identified star. Both the starlight direction and its error are estimated in the pre-filter. The estimated starlight directions of all identified stars are the measurements of the navigation filter. The simulation results show that both the reliability and accuracy of the integration are improved and the integration is effective when only one star is identified in a period.

The accuracy of attitude determination using a star sensor tends to be degraded if the host vehicle's manoeuvring smears the star image. In this paper, a new restoration algorithm with the aid of a Strap-down Inertial Navigation System (SINS) is proposed to reduce the effect of the smeared image. The smeared trace length is estimated with aid of the SINS angular rate. The restoration algorithm based on a Wiener filter is designed after the smeared zone is derived with the aid of the SINS coarse attitude. A tracking method is proposed to reject the stars of low centroid extraction accuracy. Simulations demonstrate that the success rate and the accuracy of attitude determination are improved significantly by the restoration algorithm even under a very fast rotation. The impact of the SINS error on the restoration is evaluated in the simulations.