Precise orbit determination for BDS satellites

Abstract

Since the first pair of BeiDou satellites was deployed in 2000, China has made continuous efforts to establish its own independent BeiDou Navigation Satellite System (BDS) to provide the regional radio determination satellite service as well as regional and global radio navigation satellite services, which rely on the high quality of orbit and clock products. This article summarizes the achievements in the precise orbit determination (POD) of BDS satellites in the past decade with the focus on observation and orbit dynamic models. First, the disclosed metadata of BDS satellites is presented and the contribution to BDS POD is addressed. The complete optical properties of the satellite bus as well as solar panels are derived based on the absorbed parameters as well the material properties. Secondly, the status and tracking capabilities of the L-band data from accessible ground networks are presented, while some low earth orbiter satellites with onboard BDS tracking capability are listed. The topological structure and measurement scheme of BDS Inter-Satellite-Link (ISL) data are described. After highlighting the progress on observation models as well as orbit perturbations for BDS, e.g., phase center corrections, satellite attitude, and solar radiation pressure, different POD strategies used for BDS are summarized. In addition, the urgent requirement for error modeling of the ISL data is emphasized based on the analysis of the observation noises, and the incompatible characteristics of orbit and clock derived with L-band and ISL data are illuminated and discussed. The further researches on the improvement of phase center calibration and orbit dynamic models, the refinement of ISL observation models, and the potential contribution of BDS to the estimation of geodetic parameters based on L-band or ISL data are identified. With this, it is promising that BDS can achieve better performance and provides vital contributions to the geodesy and navigation.

GPS/Galileo/BDS-2/BDS-3 full-frequency uncombined precise point positioning with fast ambiguity resolution and single-epoch ambiguity resolution on a global scale

“…The changes in the B1IB3I WL UPDs and NL UPDs of the BDS-2 MEO satellites were slightly larger than those of the L1L2 WL UPDs and NL UPDs of the GPS satellites. The reason could be that the orbits of the BDS-2 MEO satellites were slightly worse than those of the GPS satellites (Zhao et al 2022).…”

“…The GPS-only daily static solutions were used as benchmarks. Then, experiments were implemented as follows.4.1 UPD estimation experimentsBecause the MEO satellites had the best orbit accuracies(Zhao et al 2022) and could provide global coverage, only the UPDs of the GPS, Galileo, BDS-2 and BDS-3 MEO satellites were computed. The interval was 15 min, as inGe et al (2008).…”

A multipath mitigation algorithm for GNSS signals based on the steepest descent approach

“…To verify the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm, a set of tests was conducted with the BeiDou Navigation Satellite System (BDS) B1I signal (Li et al, 2020;Zhao et al, 2022) (13)…”

On the potential contribution of BeiDou-3 to the realization of the terrestrial reference frame scale

“…The E1 + BOX META solution relies on the CSNO released metadata. Lack of the reflection and diffusion properties limits the accuracy of SRP modeling; however, the assignment of the remaining coefficient can be concluded based on the research on the properties of individual spacecraft elements (Chen and Wu 2020;Duan et al 2022;Zhao et al 2022). Another simplification made in the BDS metadata file suggests that the satellite body of BDS-3 CAST MEO satellites is a standard cuboid, while Zhang et al (2020) implied that a dedicated T-shaped platform had been developed.…”

“…This study aims at evaluating the potential contribution of the BDS-3 MEO constellation in the definition of the TRF scale based on the ground calibrated BDS-3 satellite PCOs (CSNO 2019a) and the absolute multi-frequency GNSS receiver antenna calibrations delivered by Geo++ (Wübbena et al 2019). Given the fairly poor orbit quality and regional nature of the BDS-3 Inclined Geosynchronous Orbit (IGSO) and Geostationary (GEO) spacecraft (Zhao et al 2022), we limited our analysis to BDS-3 MEO satellites to provide the best possible quality of the results.…”