The update rate is a key characteristic of star sensors,and it has been considered as an important research direction in future.In this paper,a method for increasing the update rate of a star sensor is presented and the composition of update time is introduced.The parallel processing mechanisms by using a pipelining method are analyzed emphatically,then a sequential working mode,a two cycle pipelining mode,a three-cycle pipelining mode and a more cycle pipelining mode are successfully realized on the engineering prototype. Moreover,the sequence diagrams and formulas of update rate for different modes are given,and the specific software and hardware implementation methods are described. Finally,a software interpolation method for increasing update rate of the star sensor is introduced.The experimental results indicate that the update rate by parallel processing mechanisms using the pipelining method can reach 8-10 Hz,which has increased by 2-3 times as compared with that of the traditional method.