Preliminary Orbit Determination For A Small Satellite Mission Using GPS Receiver Data

The deviations in the injection orbital parameters, resulting from launcher dispersions, need to be estimated and used for autonomous satellite operations. For the proposed small satellite mission of the university there will be two GPS receivers onboard the satellite to provide the instantaneous orbital state to the onboard data handling system. In order to meet the power requirements, the satellite will be sun-tracking whenever there is no imaging operation. For imaging activities, the satellite will be maneuvered to nadir-pointing mode. Due to such different modes of orientation the geometry for the GPS receivers will not be favorable at all times and there will be instances of poor geometry resulting in no output from the GPS receivers. Onboard the satellite, the orbital information should be continuously available for autonomous switching on/off of various subsystems. The paper presents the strategies to make use of small arcs of data from GPS receivers to compute the mean orbital parameters and use the updated orbital parameters to calculate the position and velocity whenever the same is not available from GPS receiver. Thus the navigation message from the GPS receiver, namely the position vector in Earth-Centered-Earth-Fixed (ECEF) frame, is used as measurements. As for estimation, two techniques - (1) batch least squares method, and (2) Kalman Filter method are used for orbit estimation (in real time). The performance of the onboard orbit estimation has been assessed based on hardware based multi-channel GPS Signal simulator. The results indicate good converge even with short arcs of data as the GPS navigation data are generally very accurate and the data rate is also fast (typically 1Hz).