TRIFLE DIFFERENCE APPROACH TO LOW EARTH ORBITER PRECISION ORBIT DETERMINATION

A precise kinematic orbit determination (P-KOD) procedure for Low Earth Orbiter(LEO) using the GPS ion-free triple differenced carrier phases is presented. Because the triple differenced observables provide only relative information, the first epoch's positions of the orbit should be held fixed. Then, both forward and backward filtering was executed to mitigate the effect of biases of the first epoch's position. p-KOD utilizes the precise GPS orbits and ground stations data from International GPS Service (IGS) so that the only unknown parameters to be solved are positions of the satellite at each epoch. Currently, the 3-D accuracy off-KOD applied to CHAMP (CHAllenging Min-isatellite Payload) shows better than 35 cm compared to the published rapid scientific orbit (RSO) solution from GFZ (GeoForschungsZentrum Potsdam). The data screening for cycle slips is a particularly challenging procedure for LEO, which moves very fast in the middle of the ionospheric layer. It was found that data screening using SNR (signal to noise ratio) generates best results based on the residual analysis using RSO. It is expected that much better accuracy are achievable with refined prescreening procedure and optimized geometry of the satellites and ground stations.