Aiming at the application requirements of laser communication and atmospheric short-wave Infrared (SWIR) spectroscopy of low-orbit satellites, this paper proposes a design method for star short-wave infrared imagers. Since the anti-total dose radiation capacity of the low-orbit satellite system is required to be more than 20k Rad (Si), the method first screens the InGaAs focal plane detector with a total dose radiation resistance of more than 20k Rad (Si); Then the aerospace-level components are used to design the corresponding timing drive, temperature control, analog-to-digital conversion, image transmission, remote control telemetry and other hardware circuit modules to form the hardware part of the imager; Finally, the PID temperature control algorithm is applied to achieve accurate temperature control of the imager, and the non-uniformity correction algorithm and image enhancement algorithm are used to improve the image quality of the imager. After test verification, the short-wave infrared imager has a total dose radiation resistance capacity of 25k Rad(Si), a dynamic range of 61dB, and a non-uniformity of 1.9%, which meets the requirements of short-wave infrared spectroscopy detection of low-orbit satellites.