Search

The satellite Fengyun 3C(FY3C) launched in 2013 and carried a global navigation satellite system (GNSS) occultation sounder, which is the first BDS/GPS compatible radio occultation sounder in the world and records both GPS and BDS measurements. It provides an opportunity for investigating the precision realtime orbit determination based on space‐borne GPS/BDS measurements. In order to realize the real‐time orbit determination based on space‐borne GPS/BDS measurements with decimeter‐level accuracy, this paper carries out in‐depth research in the following aspects. Firstly, the real‐time orbit determination mathematical model based on the space‐borne GPS/BDS carrier phase observations is introduced. Then the properties of the errors in the signal’s propagation path that originates from GPS/BDS broadcast ephemeris are analyzed, and the signal‐in ‐propagation path error(SIPPE) statistics of different kinds of GPS/BDS satellites are also presented. Based on the analysis, a pseudo‐ambiguity is modeled as a stochastic process and estimated in the real‐time orbit determmination(RTOD) filter to absorb the SIPPE error, and then the decimeter‐ level accuracy can be realized. The space‐borne GPS/BDS data from China’ s FY3C satellite are em ‐ ployed for the simulative RTOD test using the SATODS software. Results have demonstrated that the position and velocity accuracy of 30 cm and 0.3 mm/s, respectively, are achieved when using GPS/BDS carrierphase data and broadcast ephemeris. Although the accuracy of BDS broadcast ephemeris is obviously worse than that of GPS, orbit results of the GPS/BDS fusion solution with reasonable stochastic models for pseudo‐ambiguities will be slightly superior to that using single GPS data. For example, when the FY3C satellite flew over Asia/Pacific region where more BDS satellites can be tracked, the orbit accuracy can be improved by 10% with the GPS/BDS fusion solution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The advancements of Earth observations, remote sensing, communications and navigation augmentation based on low Earth orbit (LEO) platforms present strong requirements for accurate, real-time and autonomous navigation of LEO satellites. Precise onboard real-time orbit determination (RTOD) using the space-borne data of multiple global navigation satellite systems (multi-GNSS) becomes practicable along with the availability of multi-GNSS. We study the onboard RTOD algorithm and experiments by using America's Global Positioning System (GPS) and China's regional BeiDou Navigation Satellite System (BDS-2) space-borne data of the FengYun-3C satellite. A new pseudo-ambiguity parameter, which combines the constant phase ambiguity, the orbit and clock offset error of the GPS/BDS broadcast ephemeris in the line-of-sight (LOS), is defined and estimated in order to reduce the negative effect of the LOS error on onboard RTOD. The analyses on the variation of the LOS error in the GPS/BDS broadcast ephemeris indicate that the pseudo-ambiguity parameter could be modeled as a random walk, and the setting of the power spectral density in the random walk model decides whether the pseudo-ambiguity can be estimated reasonably and the LOS error could be reduced or not. For different types of GPS/BDS satellites, the LOS errors show different variation characteristics, so the power spectral density should be set separately and differently. A numerical search approach is presented in this paper to find the optimal setting of the power spectral density for each type of GPS/BDS satellite by a series of tests. Based on the optimal stochastic model, a 3-dimensional (3D) real-time orbit accuracy of 0.7–2.0 m for position and 0.7–1.7 mm/s for velocity could be achieved only with dual-frequency BDS measurements and the broadcast ephemeris, while a notably superior orbit accuracy of 0.3–0.5 m for position and 0.3–0.5 mm/s for velocity is achievable using dual-frequency GPS/BDS measurements, due to the absorption effect of the estimated pseudo-ambiguity on the LOS error of the GPS/BDS broadcast ephemeris. Compared to using GPS-alone data, the GPS/BDS fusion only marginally improves the onboard RTOD orbit accuracy by about 1–3 cm, but the inclusion of BDS satellites increases the number of the tracked GNSS satellites and thus speeds up the convergence of the filter. Furthermore, the GPS/BDS fusion could help suppress the local orbit errors, ensure the orbit accuracy and improve the reliability and availability of the onboard RTOD when fewer GPS satellites are tracked in some anomalous arcs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]