China is developing a new generation of geostationary meteorological satellites called Fengyun-4 (FY-4), which is planned for launch beginning in 2016. Following upon the current FY-2 satellite series, FY-4 will carry four new instruments: the Advanced Geosynchronous Radiation Imager (AGRI), the Geosynchronous Interferometric Infrared Sounder (GIIRS), the Lightning Mapping Imager (LMI), and the Space Environment Package (SEP). The first satellite of the FY-4 series launched on 11 December 2016 is experimental, and the following four or more satellites will be operational. The main objectives of the FY-4 series are to monitor rapidly changing weather systems and to improve warning and forecasting capabilities. The FY-4 measurements are aimed at accomplishing 1) high temporal and spatial resolution imaging in 14 spectral bands from the visible, near-infrared, and infrared (IR) spectral regions; 2) lightning imaging; and 3) high-spectral-resolution IR sounding observations over China and adjacent regions. FY-4 will also enhance the space weather monitoring and warning with SEP. Current products from FY-2 will be improved by FY-4, and a number of new products will also be introduced. FY-4’s sounding and imaging data will be used to improve applications in a wide range of ocean, land, and atmosphere monitoring plus forecasting extreme weather (especially typhoons and thunderstorms); overall, FY-4 will contribute to more accurate understanding and forecasting of China’s weather, climate, environment, and natural disasters. This new generation of Chinese geostationary weather satellites is being developed in parallel with the new generation of geostationary meteorological satellite systems from the international community of satellite providers and is intended to be an important contribution to the global observing system.

Star observation can be used for the image navigation of certain instruments aboard the three-axis stabilized geostationary satellites. How to extract the accurate star centroids in the observed star images is one of the key problems. In this paper, a high precision star centroid detection method is proposed for the advanced geosynchronous radiation imager (AGRI) of Fengyun-4A (FY-4A), the first experimental satellite of the new generation of Chinese geostationary meteorological satellites FY-4 series. Different from star sensors which are deliberately defocused with relatively large star spot, AGRI is focused for the purpose of earth observation, making it challenging to extract accurate star centroids. To solve the problem, we take the advantage of continuous observing and improve the precision of star centroiding by trajectory fitting and energy response curve fitting. Extensive experiments have been performed on simulated star images and the actual observation data of AGRI aboard FY-4A over ten months in-orbit tests. Experimental results show that the proposed method can accurately extract star centroids with the error less than 0.3 pixels, laying a solid foundation for image navigation of FY-4A.

AbstractNavigation of images from lightning mapping instruments in geostationary orbits is very important for data applications. However, few scientific peer-reviewed papers have been reported, except a few works in the pre-launch tests. On December 11, 2016, China launched the three-axis stabilized geostationary meteorological satellite Fengyun-4A(FY-4A), which carries a lightning mapping imager (LMI) onboard. LMI is now providing lightning observations above the equator at 104.7E and covers a large portion of the eastern Asian continent. In this study, a new method has been set up to perform the image navigation for FY-4A/LMI. Firstly, landmarks were used to calculate thermal deformation parameters and edge-binding technique was proposed to solve the inconsistency between the two tubes pointing directions. Secondly, temperatures of the mounting plate were used to be correlated with the daytime thermal deformation parameters to deduce the nighttime pointing directions when the landmarks were not available. Furthermore, the operational timetable for LMI was determined by analyzing the variations of navigation accuracy caused by the landmark observation interval and the sensors integration time for landmarks. Analysis of about 9200 background images of 153 consecutive days from the housekeeping data were investigated to validate the proposed methods accuracy for LMI image navigation. Compared to the baseline algorithm, navigation accuracy has been improved on average from 2-10 pixels to 1 pixel. The FY-4A/LMI navigation system has been put into operation since May 1, 2018, which has been in normal service ever since.

Fengyun-4 (FY-4) satellite series is the new generation of geostationary meteorological satellite of China. Thenewly adopted three-axis stabilized attitude control platform can increase observation efficiency and flexibility, while bringing great challenge to image navigation as well as integrated observation mode design. Considering the requirements of the earth observation, navigation and calibration besides observation flexibility, instrument observation strategies are proposed, including the earth, the moon, stars, cold space, blackbody, diffuser observations, on which the instruments' in-orbit daily observations must be based. The most complicated part is star observation strategy, while navigation precision is dependent on in-orbit star observations. Flexible, effective, stable and automatic star observation strategy directly influences obtaining star data and navigation precision. According to the requirement of navigation, two specific star observation strategies for the two main instruments onboard FY-4 were proposed to be used in the operational ground system. The strategies have been successfully used in FY-4 in-orbit test for more than a year. Both the simulation results and in-orbit application results are given, including instrument observation strategies, star observation strategies and moon tasks, to demonstrate the validity of the proposed observation strategies, which lay important foundations for the instruments' daily operation.