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GRACE-FO precise orbit determination and gravity recovery

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Abstract

The gravity recovery and climate experiment follow-on (GRACE-FO) satellites, launched in May of 2018, are equipped with geodetic quality GPS receivers for precise orbit determination (POD) and gravity recovery. The primary objective of the GRACE-FO mission is to map the time-variable and mean gravity field of the Earth. To achieve this goal, both GRACE-FO satellites are additionally equipped with a K-band ranging (KBR) system, accelerometers and star trackers. Data processing strategies, data weighting approaches and impacts of observation types and rates are investigated in order to determine the most efficient approach for processing GRACE-FO multi-type data for precise orbit determination and gravity recovery. Two GPS observation types, un-differenced (UD) and double-differenced (DD) observations in general can be used for GPS-based POD and gravity recovery. The GRACE-FO KBR observations are mainly used for gravity recovery, but they can be also used for POD to improve the relative orbit accuracy. The main purpose of this paper is to study the impacts of the DD, UD and KBR observations on GRACE-FO POD and gravity recovery. The precise orbit accuracy is assessed using several tests, which include analysis of orbital fits, satellite laser ranging residuals, KBR range residuals and orbit comparisons. The gravity recovery is validated by comparing different gravity solutions through coefficient-wise comparison, degree difference variances and water height variations over the whole Earth and selected area and river basins.

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Data availability

The synthetic datasets generated and analyzed during the study are available on request from the corresponding author. The GNSS datasets used for this study are available at https://cddis.nasa.gov/archive. The GRACE-FO data can be found at https://podaac.jpl.nasa.gov/dataset/GRACE_L1B_GRAV_JPL_RL02.

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Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the International Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) Service (IGS) for providing the GPS ground station data and GPS satellite orbit products and the International Laser Range Service (ILRS) for the SLR data. High performance computing resources were provided by the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) at the University of Texas at Austin. This research was supported by JPL contract 1604489.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Center for Space Research, University of Texas at Austin, 3925 W. Braker Lane, Suite 200, Austin, TX, 78759-5321, USA

    Z. Kang, S. Bettadpur, P. Nagel, H. Save, S. Poole & N. Pie

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  1. Z. Kang
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  2. S. Bettadpur
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  3. P. Nagel
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  4. H. Save
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  5. S. Poole
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  6. N. Pie
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Contributions

ZK and SB designed the research. The software modification for this study was performed by ZK with support from PN. ZK made the precise orbit determination and gravity recovery using GPS UD and KBR data; PN made them using GPS DD and KBR data. ZK wrote the manuscript with corrections and comments from SB, PN and SP. All authors were involved in result discussions throughout the development.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Z. Kang.

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Kang, Z., Bettadpur, S., Nagel, P. et al. GRACE-FO precise orbit determination and gravity recovery. J Geod 94, 85 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00190-020-01414-3

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