Kinematic and Dynamic Determination of Trajectories for Low Earth Satellites Using GPS

Summary

With an increasing number of satellites carrying reliable GPS receivers orbit determination using the high precision and uninterrupted GPS tracking technique gains increasing attention. Different from other approaches for generating kinematic satellite trajectories based on zero- or double-differenced GPS observations the procedure developed at our institute uses zero-differences with differences from epoch to epoch for the phase observable. The approach is very efficient due to the elimination of the phase ambiguities. In addition it includes a sophisticated data cleaning procedure. It may also be applied to objects moving on other than Earth-orbiting trajectories.

Within the LEO Pilot Project of the IGS (International GPS Service) a CHAMP orbit test campaign has been established covering eleven days from May 20 to 30, 2001 (day 140–150, 2001). A dozen institutions are contributing to the project and compare their kinematic and dynamic orbit results within the campaign.