Analysis of a possible future degradation in the DORIS geodetic results related to changes in the satellite constellation

Abstract

Recently, several improvements were made in the DORIS data processing at the IGN/JPL (Institut Geographique National, France; Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, USA) analysis center: use of GRACE-derived gravity fields, data preprocessing and station discontinuity detection, etc. This allowed enhanced performances for ground station geodetic positioning (typically 10 mm using a week of data), as well as for polar motion (0.5–1.0 mass for daily determination). However, since the loss in 2004 of the DORIS receiver on the TOPEX/Poseidon mission, only four satellites (SPOT-2, SPOT-4, SPOT-5, and ENVISAT) are currently equipped with DORIS receivers. Furthermore, most of them are aging and some have already far exceeded their expected lifetime. The goal of this paper is to analyze how the geodetic performances could be degraded in the future if one or more of these satellites would unfortunately be lost, and to envisage which satellites are currently the most critical in the DORIS geodetic performances. We have reanalyzed 1 year of recent DORIS data (2005), processing all possible combinations of satellite constellation sub-sets. We then compared these results (station coordinates and polar motion) with those obtained in regular data processing when using DORIS data from all four available satellites in 2005. We demonstrate the importance of the SPOT-5 data, equipped with a new type of on-board DORIS receiver. The study also shows some possible weaknesses in our current ENVISAT orbit computations. Fortunately, new DORIS satellites are also expected in the near future (Jason-2, CRYOSAT-2 and AltiKa), which could improve current DORIS-derived geodetic results due to their specific type of orbit (different from the SPOT sun-synchronous orbits) and also to enhanced on-board receivers.