The Effects of Acceleration Noise Performance on the Determination of the Earth’s Time-varying Gravity Field for Low-low satellite-to-satellite Tracking missions.

Abstract:

GRACE provides monthly average gravity field solutions in spherical harmonic coefficients, which gives us information about land and ocean mass variations with a spatial resolution of 1 degree and with an accuracy within 2 cm throughout the entire Earth. GRACE-FO is expected to be launched in 2017 to continue the work of GRACE and to test a new laser ranging interferometer (LRI) which measures the range between the two satellites with higher precision than the K-Band ranging system used in GRACE. Moreover, there have been simulation studies that show that an additional pair of satellites in an inclined orbit increases the sampling frequency and reduces temporal aliasing errors. On the other hand, GOCE used an electrostatic gravity gradiometer and a drag-free control system to compensate for the non-gravitational forces which had better performance than the electrostatic accelerometers of GRACE. Given the fact that future missions will likely continue to use the low-low satellite-to-satellite tracking formation with LRI onboard, it is expected that acceleration noise caused by non-gravitational forces will become a limiting factor for the time-varying gravity field solution. This research evaluates the effects of acceleration noise on the estimation of the time-varying gravity field for a single pair and the optimal double pairs of satellites, assuming that the satellites fly in collinear pairs with LRI. Spherical harmonic coefficients are used to represent the solution and a batch computation Kalman filter is used to estimate the solutions. Various levels of residual noise for existing drag-free systems are applied as acceleration noise to find suitable drag-free performance requirements for upcoming geodesy missions.