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Improving BeiDou precise orbit determination using observations of onboard MEO satellite receivers

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Abstract

In recent years, the precise orbit determination (POD) of the regional Chinese BeiDou Navigation Satellite System (BDS) has been a hot spot because of its special constellation consisting of five geostationary earth orbit (GEO) satellites and five inclined geosynchronous satellite orbit (IGSO) satellites besides four medium earth orbit (MEO) satellites since the end of 2012. GEO and IGSO satellites play an important role in regional BDS applications. However, this brings a great challenge to the POD, especially for the GEO satellites due to their geostationary orbiting. Though a number of studies have been carried out to improve the POD performance of GEO satellites, the result is still much worse than that of IGSO and MEO, particularly in the along-track direction. The major reason is that the geostationary characteristic of a GEO satellite results in a bad geometry with respect to the ground tracking network. In order to improve the tracking geometry of the GEO satellites, a possible strategy is to mount global navigation satellite system (GNSS) receivers on MEO satellites to collect the signals from GEO/IGSO GNSS satellites so as that these observations can be used to improve GEO/IGSO POD. We extended our POD software package to simulate all the related observations and to assimilate the MEO-onboard GNSS observations in orbit determination. Based on GPS and BDS constellations, simulated studies are undertaken for various tracking scenarios. The impact of the onboard GNSS observations is investigated carefully and presented in detail. The results show that MEO-onboard observations can significantly improve the orbit precision of GEO satellites from metres to decimetres, especially in the along-track direction. The POD results of IGSO satellites also benefit from the MEO-onboard data and the precision can be improved by more than 50% in 3D direction.

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Acknowledgements

This work is supported by the National Natural Science Funds of China (41622401, 41574023, 41374031). The first author is financially supported by the China Scholarship Council (CSC) for his study at the German Research Centre for Geosciences (GFZ).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. College of Surveying and Geo-Informatics, Tongji University, Shanghai, 200092, China

    Haibo Ge, Bofeng Li & Yunzhong Shen

  2. Department of Geodesy, GeoForschungsZentrum (GFZ), Telegrafenberg, 14473, Potsdam, Germany

    Haibo Ge, Maorong Ge & Harald Schuh

Authors
  1. Haibo Ge
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  2. Bofeng Li
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  3. Maorong Ge
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  4. Yunzhong Shen
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  5. Harald Schuh
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Correspondence to Bofeng Li.

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Ge, H., Li, B., Ge, M. et al. Improving BeiDou precise orbit determination using observations of onboard MEO satellite receivers. J Geod 91, 1447–1460 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00190-017-1035-9

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