Performance Assessment of a Turn Around Ranging in Communication Satellite Orbit Determination

Abstract

Satellite operators utilize a two-stations turn around ranging (TAR) system to reduce the ground station measurement system's complexity and cost while having the same or better orbit determination accuracy for communication satellites orbit determination recently. This study investigates two stations' performance, four-way ranging on communication satellite orbit determination, operational conformance, and cost. The observation data sets are collected using traditional single station tracking (SST) and the new method TAR. The computed results using the Monte Carlo method encourage the satellite operators to use a four-way ranging system to observe and measure required data sets. TAR performance is evaluated, taking SST as a reference. The six classical orbital elements (a, e, i, RAAN, AoP, and TA) are compared for large numbers of observation data. The SST and TAR results are very close to each other. The worst-case calculated Euclidian distance between SST and TAR is 1.893 km at the epoch below the 6 km success criteria. The TAR observation method is appropriate to collect data sets for precise orbit determination. This work result indicates that satellite operators should consider deploying TAR stations to collect two-station range data sets and compute the orbit for nominal north-south station-keeping maneuvers (NSSK) and east-west station-keeping (EWSK) maneuver operations. The TAR method is superior to SST in terms of accuracy, operational conformance, and costs.

Tdoa Based Tracking Measurement for Geo Satellites Orbit Determination: Evaluation for the Satellite Operators

“…The transmitter and the receiver's equipment for tracking may be onboard satellites or on the ground stations. There are various types of ground-based radio observation such as azimuth, elevation, range, range to rage, turn around range, range rate, TDOA, and FDOA [16].…”

“…In addition to these, the software can propagate an orbit precisely into the future from a set of initial observations taking the various instrumentation errors and perturbations into consideration. The software processes the data to estimate the orbits using the methods such as Weighted Least Squares and Sequential Processing [16].…”