Abstract
Chinese BeiDou navigation satellite system is in official service as a regional constellation with five geostationary earth orbit (GEO) satellites, five inclined geosynchronous satellite orbit (IGSO) satellites and four medium earth orbit (MEO) satellites. There are mainly two methods for precise orbit determination of the BeiDou constellation found in the current literatures. One is the independent single-system method, where only BeiDou observations are used without help from other GNSS systems. The other is the two-step GPS-assisted method where in the first step, GPS data are used to resolve some common parameters, such as station coordinates, receiver clocks and zenith tropospheric delay parameters, which are then introduced as known quantities in BeiDou processing in the second step. We conduct a thorough performance comparison between the two methods. Observations from the BeiDou experimental tracking stations and the IGS Multi-GNSS Experiment network from January 1 to March 31, 2013, are processed with the Positioning and Navigation Data Analyst (PANDA) software. The results show that for BeiDou IGSO and MEO satellites, the two-step GPS-assisted method outperforms the independent single-system method in both internal orbit overlap precision and external satellite laser ranging validation. For BeiDou GEO satellites, the two methods show close performances. Zenith tropospheric delays estimated from the first method are very close to those estimated from GPS precise point positioning in the second method, with differences of several millimeters. Satellite clock estimates from the two methods show similar performances when assessing the stability of the BeiDou on board clocks.
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Acknowledgments
We thank the IGS MGEX campaign for providing multi-GNSS data. We are grateful to the reviewers for their constructive comments and suggestions. This work was supported by the National Nature Science Foundation of China (No. 41374034) and the National “863 Program” of China (Grant No. 2012AA12A202).
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Lou, Y., Liu, Y., Shi, C. et al. Precise orbit determination of BeiDou constellation: method comparison. GPS Solut 20, 259–268 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10291-014-0436-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10291-014-0436-y