A new analytical solar radiation pressure model for current BeiDou satellites: IGGBSPM

Abstract

An analytical solar radiation pressure (SRP) model, IGGBSPM (an abbreviation for Institute of Geodesy and Geophysics BeiDou Solar Pressure Model), has been developed for three BeiDou satellite types, namely, geostationary orbit (GEO), inclined geosynchronous orbit (IGSO) and medium earth orbit (MEO), based on a ray-tracing method. The performance of IGGBSPM was assessed based on numerical integration, SLR residuals and analyses of empirical SRP parameters (except overlap computations). The numerical results show that the integrated orbit resulting from IGGBSPM differs from the precise ephemerides by approximately 5 m and 2 m for GEO and non-GEO satellites, respectively. Moreover, when IGGBSPM is used as an a priori model to enhance the ECOM (5-parameter) model with stochastic pulses, named ECOM + APR, for precise orbit determination, the SLR RMS residual improves by approximately 20–25 percent over the ECOM-only solution during the yaw-steering period and by approximately 40 percent during the yaw-fixed period. For the BeiDou GEO01 satellite, improvements of 18 and 32 percent can be achieved during the out-of-eclipse season and during the eclipse season, respectively. An investigation of the estimated ECOM D0 parameters indicated that the β-angle dependence that is evident in the ECOM-only solution is no longer present in the ECOM + APR solution.

Quality assessment of multi-GNSS orbits and clocks for real-time precise point positioning

“…They are in a deep 1:1 orbit resonance with the earth's gravity field (Hugentobler 1998), where a small change of external forces acting on a satellite causes substantial changes of a satellite position. The quality of BeiDou GEO is thus much worse than of MEO or IGSO (Tan et al 2016).…”

Initial Results of the Precise Orbit Determination for the New-Generation BeiDou Satellites (BeiDou-3) Based on the iGMAS Network

“…With a larger and more well-distributed global tracking network, which can provide better coverage for all BeiDou-3 satellites, particularly for global MEO satellites, the accuracy of BeiDou-3 satellite POD will be improved. Meanwhile, more ground tracking stations and precise-orbit products will be notably helpful with the SRP modeling for BeiDou-3 satellites in the near future [23].…”

Fast solar radiation pressure modelling with ray tracing and multiple reflections

“…In the modelling of solar radiation pressure, a pixel array is generated with each pixel as the start point of the rays. The pixel array is placed in the direction of the sun with some distance away from the spacecraft (Ziebart, 2001(Ziebart, , 2004Ziebart et al, 2005;Tan et al, 2016). In practice, the distance is set to make sure that the pixel array is outside of the spacecraft.…”