Precision Assessment of Near Real Time Precise Orbit Determination for Low Earth Orbiter

Abstract

Department of Electronics Engineering, Chung-Nam National University, Daejeon 305-764, KoreaThe precise orbit determination (POD) of low earth orbiter (LEO) has complied with its required positioning accuracy by the double-differencing of observations between International GNSS Service (IGS) and LEO to eliminate the common clock error of the global positioning system (GPS) satellites and receiver. Using this method, we also have achieved the 1 m positioning accuracy of Korea Multi-Purpose Satellite (KOMPSAT)-2. However double-differencing POD has huge load of processing the global network of lots of ground stations because LEO turns around the Earth with rapid velocity. And both the centimeter accuracy and the near real time (NRT) processing have been needed in the LEO POD applica-tions--atmospheric sounding or urgent image processing--as well as the surveying. An alternative to differential GPS for high accuracy NRT POD is precise point positioning (PPP) to use measurements from one satellite receiver only, to re-place the broadcast navigation message with precise post processed values from IGS, and to have phase measurements of dual frequency GPS receiver. PPP can obtain positioning accuracy comparable to that of differential positioning. KOMPSAT-5 has a precise dual frequency GPS flight receiver (integrated GPS and occultation receiver, IGOR) to satisfy the accuracy requirements of 20 cm positioning accuracy for highly precise synthetic aperture radar image processing and to collect GPS radio occultation measurements for atmospheric sounding. In this paper we obtained about 3-5 cm positioning accuracies using the real GPS data of the Gravity Recover and Climate Experiment (GRACE) satellites loaded the Blackjack receiver, a predecessor of IGOR. And it is important to reduce the latency of orbit determination processing in the NRT POD. This latency is determined as the volume of GPS measurements. Thus changing the sampling intervals, we show their latency to able to reduce without the precision degradation as the assessment of their precision.