Abstract
Abstract. The Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) mission has yielded data on the Earth's gravity field to monitor temporal changes for more than 15 years. The GRACE twin satellites use microwave ranging with micrometre precision to measure the distance variations between two satellites caused by the Earth's global gravitational field. GRACE Follow-on (GRACE-FO) will be the first satellite mission to use inter-satellite laser interferometry in space. The laser ranging instrument (LRI) will provide two additional measurements compared to the GRACE mission: interferometric inter-satellite ranging with nanometre precision and inter-satellite pointing information. We have designed a set of simulated GRACE-FO data, which include LRI measurements, apart from all other GRACE instrument data needed for the Earth's gravity field recovery. The simulated data files are publicly available via https://doi.org/10.22027/AMDC2 and can be used to derive gravity field solutions like from GRACE data. This paper describes the scientific basis and technical approaches used to simulate the GRACE-FO instrument data.
Highlights
The space gravimetry mission Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) (Tapley et al, 2004) observes the Earth’s gravity field changes with time
It was added to the error-free ranging products, as was a geometric error, which is a pointing jitter coupling effect caused by an offset of the K-band ranging (KBR) antenna phase centre for each satellite A and B: ρKBR1B = ρ + δρSO + δρAPCA + δρAPCB + ρKBR1B
We have described the simulation of observation and noise models for the GRACE-FO multi-sensor system consisting of inter-satellite ranging with microwave and laser ranging instruments, GPS orbit tracking, accelerometry, and attitude sensing
Summary
The space gravimetry mission GRACE (Tapley et al, 2004) observes the Earth’s gravity field changes with time. Flechtner et al (2016) have performed a full-scale simulation over the nominal GRACE-FO mission lifetime of 5 years and showed notable improvements with the LRI on a global scale of the order of 23 %. Exploitation of the new GRACE-FO measurements has great potential to improve the spatial and temporal resolution of the Earth’s gravity field solutions. There are different techniques to recover the Earth’s gravity field from GRACE-like data N. Darbeheshti et al.: Instrument data simulations for GRACE Follow-on form medium to test and improve different gravity field recovery techniques. – and to use new LRI data, such as LRI ranging and LRI attitude information, in different gravity field recovery techniques. The first section presents the preliminaries for the data simulation, including the coordinate systems and symbols, followed by each section describing each instrument data simulation with details of the instrument noise models
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