The contribution of intersatellite links to BDS‐3 orbit determination: Model refinement and comparisons

By end‐2018, the Chinese BeiDou satellite system (BDS) has entered its third phase of global scale coverage (BDS‐3). This study presents and validates a modified modeling aspect concerning an intersatellite link (ISL) hardware delay estimation. The precise orbit determination (POD) results of BDS‐3 demonstrate this aspect along with calibrated phase center offsets (PCOs) of the ISL terminal to help improve the orbit accuracy. After onboarding the ISL data, two additional sets of POD solutions using regional and global ground stations are conducted. About a 40% improvement can be achieved for regional cases and 20% for global cases after ISL data were used for POD. The best POD performance solution is obtained with observations from both the global ground stations and ISL when the averaged 3D root mean squares of the orbit overlapping differences can reach around 20 cm and the signal‐in‐space range errors (SISREs) obtained by 6‐hour predicted clock and orbit solutions show an average value of 25 cm.