A Comparative Study on the Solar Radiation Pressure Modeling in GPS Precise Orbit Determination

Abstract

For Global Positioning System (GPS) precise orbit determination (POD), the solar radiation pressure (SRP) is the dominant nongravitational perturbation force. Among the current SRP models, the ECOM and box-wing models are widely used in the International GNSS Service (IGS) community. However, the performance of different models varies over different GPS satellites. In this study, we investigate the performances of different SRP models, including the box-wing and adjustable box-wing as a priori models, and ECOM1 and ECOM2 as parameterization models, in the GPS POD solution from 2017 to 2019. Moreover, we pay special attention to the handling of the shadow factor in the SRP modeling for eclipsing satellites, which is critical to achieve high-precision POD solutions but has not yet been fully investigated. We demonstrate that, as an a priori SRP model, the adjustable box-wing has better performance than the box-wing model by up to 5 mm in the orbit day boundary discontinuity (DBD) statistics, with the largest improvement observed on the BLOCK IIR satellites using the ECOM1 as a parameterization SRP model. The box-wing model shows an insignificant orbit improvement serving as the a priori SRP model. For the eclipsing satellites, the three-dimensional (3D) root mean square (RMS) values of orbit DBD are improved when the shadow factor is applied only in the D direction (pointing toward to Sun) than that in the three directions (D, Y, and B) in the satellite frame. Different SRP models have comparable performance in terms of the Earth rotation parameter (ERP) agreement with the IERS EOP 14C04 product, whereas the magnitude of the length of day (LoD) annual signal is reduced when the shadow factor is applied in the D direction than in the three directions. This study clarifies how the shadow factor should be applied in the GPS POD solution and demonstrates that the a priori adjustable box-wing model combined with ECOM1 is more suitable for high-precision GPS POD solutions, which is useful for the further GNSS data analysis.

A Single-Averaged Model for the Solar Radiation Pressure Applied to Space Debris Mitigation Using a Solar Sail

“…Several authors have taken into account the solar radiation pressure models to explore the dynamics of artificial satellites, asteroids, and space debris; for example, see references [9][10][11][27][28][29][30][31][32][33][34][35][36] (and references therein). For the equation of the perturbing potential due to a third body, we use a single-averaged model [37] including the perturbations coming from the Sun and Moon and assuming that these perturbing bodies are moving in elliptical and inclined orbits.…”

Estimating surface optical properties and thermal thrust for Galileo satellite body and solar panels

“…For satellites with a high level of complexity in the spacecraft structure, the precise ray-tracing model is preferred if the detailed CAD model of the satellite is known (Li et al 2018;Ziebart 2001;Ziebart and Dare 2001). In the absence of a perfect analytical model, the ECOM or hybrid ECOM model is widely used (Arnold et al 2015;Beutler et al 1994;Tang et al 2021;Tseng 2021) in GNSS satellite orbit determination. Prange et al (2017) confirm that the ECOM2 model performs much better than the 5-parameter ECOM model (Springer et al 1999) for Galileo satellites.…”