FAST NAVIGATION OF AVHRR IMAGES USING COMPLEX ORBITAL MODELS

A method of mapping from geographical coordinates to the line and pixe l location in Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer (AVHRR) data is presented using Chebyshev polynomials to invert complex orbital model s such as SGP4. The result is a computationally efficient approximatio n to the model with numerical errors substantially below pixel resolut ion. Further improvements designed to reduce the execution time of a c artographic image re-projection program based on this method are descr ibed, and test results are presented to illustrate the performance ben efits.