The Research Activities of the Main Astronomical Observatory of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine on the Use of GNSS Technology

Abstract

The current state of the research activities of the Main Astronomical Observatory of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine (MAO NASU) on the use of GNSS technology is presented. Today, MAO operates a permanent GNSS network consisting of five stations (two stations are temporarily inactive). All stations are included in EPN and the EPOS network, GLSV, KHAR, and UZHL stations are also integrated to the IGS network. MAO Operational Centre also provides automatic data transfer from 12 stations installed by other Ukrainian organizations included in the international networks. Data from approximately 300 Ukrainian permanent GNSS stations are stored in the MAO Local Data Centre. The MAO Local Analysis Centre uses Bernese GNSS Software for different types of data processing of GNSS observations. Rapid processing is performed on a daily basis for monitoring the stability of the permanent stations from some Ukrainian RTK networks. All available observations data from the Ukrainian stations for the period from December 7, 1997, to January 28, 2017, were processed according EPN standards during the MAO’s second reprocessing campaign and regular processing. As a result, the coordinates in the IGb08 reference frame and tropospheric zenith delays for 233 permanent stations (202 of them are the Ukrainian stations), as well as the velocities for the 128 stations that have observation period more than 3 years, were estimated. The creation and development of local GNSS networks, as well as the long-term filling of databases with high-precision coordinate solutions and estimates of the displacement velocities of GNSS stations, made possible to conduct geodynamic studies at the local level. The strain ellipses and rotation were found based on estimated coordinates and velocities of the GNSS stations. In 2016–2019, Kharkiv National University of Radio Electronics, in cooperation with MAO NASU, performed a number of studies on high-precision GNSS positioning and navigation. New implementations of modern methods and algorithms for the PPP positioning were created and experimentally tested. The errors of the daily floating PPP solutions were 5…8 mm (with a probability of P ≈ 95%) for static mode and 5…8 cm (P ≈ 68%) for kinematic mode. The decimeter/centimeter error of determining the coordinates of current satellites with low Earth orbits (LEO) in the implementation of kinematic floating and fixed PPP solutions was proven. The development of a high-accuracy multiposition phase system of trajectory measurements for field tests of high dynamic aircrafts (HDA) were proposed. The estimated values of the root-mean-square error (RMSE) in determining the HDA motion variables were in the range from 0.05 to 0.40 m for coordinates and from 0.5 to 1.6 cm/s for the velocity vector components.