Two high-precision baseline determination strategies for long baseline satellite formation and their comparative analysis

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The issue of determining the relative orbit determination method with GNSS in the case of formation satellites with long baselines is focused on the research. Two high-precision baseline determination strategies for long-range satellite formations under fixed single-receiver ambiguity and fixed double-difference ambiguity are introduced. Using GNSS simulation data, the differences between the two baseline determination strategies for satellite formations in various baseline lengths under multiple error sources are analyzed. For each of the two procedures, the effects of each error source on the accuracy of the baseline determination are analyzed. The Monte Carlo simulation results show that: both of the above satellite formation baseline determination strategies are capable of solving baseline accuracy to millimeter level. With the increasing distance of the formation satellites, the baseline accuracy under the fixed condition of single-receiver ambiguity remains at a relatively stable level; while the baseline accuracy under the fixed condition of double-difference ambiguity decays faster due to the weakening effect of GNSS ephemeris error differencing. When the baseline distance is larger than about 5000 km, the relative orbital determination accuracy level which based on the fixed single-receiver ambiguity will gradually be better than that based on the fixed condition of double-difference ambiguity.