Based on the application requirements of high spectral resolutions, high spatial resolutions and wide swatches, a new-generation, high-performance, spaceborne, hyperspectral imaging spectrometer (NGHSI) with a spatial resolution of 15 m and a swatch of 90 km is proposed. The optical system of the NGHSI has a focal length of 1128 mm, an F-number of three, a field of view (FOV) of 7.32° and a slit length of 144 mm. A new off-axis, multi-mirror telescope structure with intermediate images is put forward, which solves the design problem that realizes secondary imaging and good telecentricity at the same time. And a new off-axis lens-compensation Offner configuration is adopted to address the challenge of the high-fidelity design of spectral imaging systems with long slit lengths. The relationship between X-Y polynomials and aberration coefficients is analyzed, and the X-Y polynomial freeform surfaces are used to correct the off-axis aberrations. The design results show that the image quality of the telescope system is close to the diffraction limit. The smile, known as the spectral distortion along the line, and keystone, which is the magnification difference for different wavelengths, of the spectral imaging system are less than 1/10 pixel size. The complete optical system of the NGHSI, including the telescope system and the spectral imaging system, has excellent imaging quality and the layout is compact and reasonable, which realizes the miniaturization design.

Addressing the scientific challenge that the physical constraints of optical system volume place on the measurement accuracy of star sensors, this paper proposes an optimized design method based on intentional under-correction of optical aberrations. We establish a mathematical model and conduct simulations to analyze the relationship between star centroid drift and primary aberrations. The results show that spherical aberration, astigmatism, field curvature, and axial chromatic aberration have minor effects, whereas coma, distortion, and lateral chromatic aberration have greater influence. Guided by this sensitivity profile, we designed a centroid-optimized optical system using intentional aberration under-correction. Compared with a traditional image-quality-based design, the proposed system reduces star centroid drift by about 3-fold, to 5.2 μm, for fields of view of 10° and above, despite larger spherical aberration and field curvature. Prototype tests confirm the designed aberration distribution, with a maximum measured centroid drift of 6.5 μm, in good agreement with predictions.

Stellar radiation simulation is critical in the space industry; however, with the current simulation methods, only a single color temperature and magnitude can be modulated at a time. Furthermore, star sensors rely on star observation tests for accurate calibration; this seriously restricts their development. This paper presents a novel star spectral information multi-partition mapping simulation method to closely simulate real sky star map information, thus replacing non-scenario-specific field stargazing experiments. First, using the stellar spectral simulation principle, a multi-partition mapping principle based on a digital micro-mirror device is proposed, and the theoretical basis of sub-region division is provided. Second, multi-component mapping simulation of stellar spectral information is expounded, and a general architecture for the same based on a double-prism symmetry structure is presented. Next, the influence of peak spectral half-peak width and peak interval on spectral simulation accuracy is analyzed, and a pre-collimated beam expansion system, multi-dimensional slit, and spectral splitting system are designed accordingly. Finally, a test platform is set up, and single-region simulation results and multi-region consistency experiments are conducted to verify the feasibility of the proposed method. Our method can realize high-precision simulation and independently control the output of various color temperatures and magnitudes. It provides a theoretical and technical basis for the development of star sensor ground calibration tests and space target detection light environment simulation.

Traditional high-precision star trackers rely on long-focal-length optical configurations, which suffer from bulky volume and heavy weight, which restricts their application to small satellite platforms. Meanwhile, lightweight optical architectures inevitably introduce residual optical aberrations that distort star spot energy distribution and degrade centroid extraction accuracy. Targeting Petzval-type star trackers, this paper proposes an optical-algorithm collaborative lightweight design scheme. First, a coupling mathematical model between centroid positioning error and four asymmetric optical aberrations is established to quantify the error contribution hierarchy of coma, astigmatism, distortion, and lateral chromatic aberration. Second, an aberration dimensionality-reduction optimization method is proposed to selectively constrain precision-sensitive asymmetric aberrations; the conventional six-element Petzval lens group is simplified to a four-element lightweight configuration, reducing lens count by 30% and total system length from 27 mm to 21 mm. Finally, a three-stage joint compensation framework consisting of aberration residual identification, iterative centroid offset correction, and regularized Richardson–Lucy image restoration is constructed for on-orbit low-computation platforms. Ground star-map tests and on-orbit measurements demonstrate that the star centroid error is reduced from 0.098 pixels to 0.014 pixels after compensation, corresponding to an 85.7% improvement in localization precision. The 16 μm in-spot energy concentration rises from 76.2% to 86.5%, with full-field energy uniformity improved by 19.2%. Attitude measurement accuracy better than 3″ ($3\sigma$) is achieved for the X- and Y-axes (roll/pitch). The system exhibits favorable robustness under stray-light and multi-scene observation conditions. This integrated optical-algorithm solution realizes arcsecond-level attitude measurement for roll and pitch axes under strict lightweight constraints.

Detector-multiplexed wide-field infrared imaging reuses detector area by folding several sub-fields of view onto a common focal-plane region, but the branch identity of an aliased small target is then unavailable from intensity alone. We propose a dual-domain optical code that combines a fixed Zemax-derived point-spread-function (PSF) library with a conditionally assigned linear-polarization codebook. To replace the earlier feature-level validation, we developed an image-level radiometric simulator that generates four analyzer images under a fixed incident-photon budget, applies mirror transfer, throughput loss, Poisson shot noise, background, read noise, and physical multi-target PSF superposition, and then re-extracts morphology and Stokes observables. The 1037 PSF samples were divided by sub-field into construction, calibration, and locked test sets of 623, 207, and 207 samples. The polarization-to-field assignment was selected by an exhaustive 9! search on the construction data, whereas the compound weight and separability threshold were fixed from calibration data only. In 25,000 locked target-level tests, the equal-weight-form compound decoder achieved 95.936% accuracy (95% confidence interval of 95.684–96.174%), compared with 10.836%, 45.564%, and 88.720% for intensity-only, shape-only, and polarization-only decoding. At the calibrated threshold, the effective capacities were five, four, and nine for the shape, polarization, and compound code spaces. The results are simulation-phase evidence and require experimental verification with measured infrared throughput and component tolerances.