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Calibrating GNSS phase biases with onboard observations of low earth orbit satellites

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Abstract

In recent years, numerous low earth orbit (LEO) satellites have been launched for different scientific tasks such as the Earth’s magnetic field, gravity recovering and ocean altimetry. The LEO satellites can cover the ocean area and are less affected by atmospheric delays and multipath errors, which provides new opportunities for calibrating the phase biases of the Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS). In this contribution, we propose an alternative approach for uncalibrated phase delay (UPD) estimation by making full use of onboard observations of LEO satellites. Stable wide-lane (WL) and narrow-lane (NL) UPDs can be obtained from spaceborne GNSS observations and agree well with the UPD products derived from 106 IGS stations. To further verify the feasibility of the proposed method for UPD estimation, zero-difference (ZD) ambiguity resolution (AR) for precise point positioning (PPP) and LEO precise orbit determination (POD) are implemented. After applying the LEO-based UPDs, the averaged convergence time for PPP AR can be reduced to 15.2 min, with an improvement of 24% compared to float solutions. As for LEO AR, the fixing rates of WL and NL ambiguities exceed 98 and 92%, respectively. The accuracies of ambiguity-fixed orbits are validated by comparing with external satellite laser ranging (SLR) and K-band ranging (KBR) observations. Compared to float solutions, the standard deviations (STDs) of SLR residuals can be reduced by 8 ~ 43%, and the KBR residuals of 3.75 mm can be achieved for fixed solutions using LEO-based UPDs, with an improvement of 60%. Although the current UPD results derived from LEO satellites are slightly worse than those of ground-based UPD, it is anticipated that the performance of LEO-based UPD can be further improved in the near future with the rapidly increasing number of LEO satellites and the continuous refinements of the POD method.

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Data availability

The onboard GNSS observations of LEO satellites are available from: ftp://swarm-diss.eo.esa.int; ftp://isdcftp.gfz-potsdam.de; ftp://ftp-access.aviso.altimetry.fr; https://scihub.copernicus.eu/gnss; ftp://cdaac-www.cosmic.ucar.edu. The GNSS raw observations of IGS stations and broadcast ephemeris are from: ftp://igs.gnsswhu.cn/pub/gps/data/daily. The precise orbit and clock products are from: ftp://igs.gnsswhu.cn/pub/gps/products/mgex.

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Acknowledgements

This study is financially supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 41974027), the National Key Research and Development Program of China (2021YFB2501100) and the Sino-German mobility programme (Grant No. M-0054). The numerical calculations in this paper have been done on the supercomputing system in the Supercomputing Center of Wuhan University.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Geodesy and Geomatics, Wuhan University, 129 Luoyu Road, Wuhan, 430079, China

    Xingxing Li, Jiaqi Wu, Xin Li, Gege Liu, Qian Zhang, Keke Zhang & Wei Zhang

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  1. Xingxing Li
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  2. Jiaqi Wu
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  3. Xin Li
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  4. Gege Liu
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  5. Qian Zhang
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  6. Keke Zhang
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  7. Wei Zhang
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Contributions

XXL and JQW provided the initial idea and wrote the manuscript; XL and GGL helped with paper writing and data analysis; QZ, KKZ and WZ contributed to LEO data processing. All authors reviewed the manuscript.

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Correspondence to Xingxing Li.

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Li, X., Wu, J., Li, X. et al. Calibrating GNSS phase biases with onboard observations of low earth orbit satellites. J Geod 96, 8 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00190-022-01600-5

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