Abstract
Accurate geocenter location is of great importance for improving the realization of terrestrial reference frame. By virtue of their lower orbit altitude, low Earth orbit (LEO) satellites naturally have a promising advantage in sensing the geocenter variations. However, more complex orbit modeling for LEO satellites with respect to those at higher altitudes poses a challenge for the geocenter estimation, despite the numerous onboard GNSS observations provided by recently increased number of LEO satellites. The purpose of this study is to investigate the performance of geocenter motion (relative position of center of mass of the whole Earth system with respect to center-of-figure of the solid Earth’s surface) estimates using multi-LEO onboard GNSS observations and dynamic force models. Three years of onboard data from seven LEO satellites are processed. We first study the impact of solar radiation pressure modeling and ambiguity fixing on the derived geocenter motion from the view of the single-LEO solution. The results show that the imperfects in a priori bow-wing models of LEO satellites can introduce significant distortions in the derived geocenter coordinates. The additional estimation of scale parameters accounting for the deficiency of a priori models can greatly remove the majority of orbital artifacts in the geocenter coordinates. With the application of the ambiguity fixing, the formal errors of geocenter coordinates are significantly reduced by over 80% for the equatorial component and 28% for the Z component. Our experiments on GRACE-FO satellites indicate that the solution using dynamic models can achieve a good consistency with the solution using accelerometer measurements at the annual frequency. The switch from accelerometer measurements to dynamic models leads to annual amplitude changes of less than 0.5 mm in the equatorial component and 1 mm in the Z component. In addition, compared to the single-LEO solutions, the multi-LEO combined solution contributes to a better decorrelation of parameters, enabling the geocenter coordinates to be less contaminated by orbit modeling deficiencies. The comparison with external solutions derived from LEO and SLR data shows a good agreement with the multi-LEO solution in both the annual amplitude and phase.
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Data availability
The GRACE-FO data are released at https://podaac.jpl.nasa.gov/GRACE-FO. The Swarm data can be downloaded from ESA at https://earth.esa.int/eogateway/missions/swarm/data, while the Sentinel-3 onboard observations are available at https://scihub.copernicus.eu. The CODE GPS products used in this study can be publicly accessed at https://cddis.nasa.gov. The SLR solutions provided by ILRS are freely available at ftp://edc.dgfi.tum.de/pub/slr/products.
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Acknowledgements
We are very grateful to the Center for Orbit Determination in Europe for providing their precise GPS precise products. This study is financially supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 41974027, No. 42374015), the National Key Research and Development Program of China (2021YFB2501102), the Hubei Province Natural Science Foundation (Grant No. 2020CFA002), the Sino-German Mobility Programme (Grant No. M-0054). The numerical calculations in this paper have been done on the supercomputing system in the Supercomputing Center of Wuhan University.
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KZ, XL, and WJ proposed the general idea of this manuscript, analyzed the data, and wrote the paper. YF, YY, JL, and WZ contributed to the paper writing and the data analyses. All authors reviewed the manuscript.
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Zhang, K., Li, X., Jiang, W. et al. Geocenter motion derived from multi-LEO precise orbit determination based on GNSS observations and dynamic force models. GPS Solut 28, 8 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10291-023-01546-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10291-023-01546-x