A new star map identification method was proposed to solve the problem of space lost of star sensor. The distance mapping vector was used to calculate the dispersion between the reference star and the navigation star, in order to shorten the list of the navigation star database and obtain the candidate navigation star. The angle feature vector and the distance feature vector were used to match the unique corresponding navigation star of the reference star through the similarity calculation. The feasibility of this method was evaluated by the performance test of simulated star map and real star map. The results show that the proposed method is robust to noise and can guarantee the recognition rate of more than 93.80% under the influence of harsh environments such as location noise, pseudo stars and missing stars.