Abstract
Gravity field reconstruction via the analysis of kinematic orbit positions has been proven to provide essential information for Earth system research purposes. For this aim, various approaches have been developed and applied to exploit kinematic orbits. In addition to those existing methods, in this paper we present a new technique. By means of a series of simulation studies we demonstrate that the novel method is comparable with the hitherto proposed techniques. As the main difference with existing methods, our approach is based on the so-called Lagrange coefficients, i.e., a semi-analytical description of the satellite motion. For this reason, we denote the technique to as the Lagrange formalism. The low sensitivity to the priori information about the gravity field, and less influence of the polar gap are of its characteristics. The investigations demonstrate that the idea of the Lagrange method in determining the Earth's gravity field could represent comparable results in term of quality with other approaches.
Highlights
In the recent decades, a strong scientific interest has emerged aiming to better understand the physics of the Earth system
Space gravimetry is intrinsically connected to the satellite missions CHAllenging Minisatellite Payload [CHAMP, Reigber et al 2002], Gravity Recovery And Climate Experiment [GRACE, Tapley et al 2004b], and Gravity field and steady-state Ocean Circulation Explorer [GOCE, ESA 1999, Pail et al 2011]
We present a new approach for gravity field recovery from High-Low Satellite-to-Satellite Tracking (HL-SST) derived orbits
Summary
A strong scientific interest has emerged aiming to better understand the physics of the Earth system. A variety of methods has been proposed to infer gravity field information by analyzing kinematic orbits derived from HL-SST observations These methods include the energy balance approach [Han et al 2002, Visser et al 2003], the acceleration approach [Reubelt et al 2003, Ditmar and van Eck van der Sluijs 2004], the short-arc approach [Mayer-Gürr 2006], and the celestial mechanics approach [Prange et al 2009]. We aim at the ability and specific characteristics of the Lagrange formalism in the gravity field modeling in a closed-loop simulation procedure In this approach, the derivative of the satellite orbit with respect to the force parameters is directly computed using the semi-analytical formulation instead of the variational equations. By the help of the semi-analytical formulation of the Lagrange formalism, the orbit perturbation during a time sub-interval could be interpreted as mass distribution This ability enables the proposed approach to model the regional gravity field
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