The Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) occultation receiver onboard the China Seismo-Electromagnetic Satellite (CSES) can provide dual-frequency observations for both GPS and BDS-2 satellites. In this study, the data quality and orbit determination performance of the CSES are assessed. Severe data loss of about 30% is observed in GPS P2/L2 data, resulting in only 11% of epochs possessing six to eight useful GPS satellites. Due to fewer channels being allocated for BDS signals, less than 5% of epochs have more than three useful BDS satellites. Precise orbit determination (POD) of CSES is firstly carried out using GPS data. The results indicate that the orbit overlap differences improved from 3.65 cm to 2.8 cm in 3D root mean square (RMS) by antenna phase center correction. CSES orbits are then derived from the BDS only, and combined GPS and BDS data. BDS-based POD indicates that adding BDS geostationary Earth orbit (GEO) satellites could dramatically degrade the orbit accuracy. When excluding BDS GEO satellites, the orbit overlap differences of BDS-based and combined POD are 23.68 cm and 2.73 cm in 3D, respectively, while the differences compared with GPS-based POD are 14.83 cm and 1.05 cm, respectively. The results suggest that the obtained orbit can satisfy centimeter-level requirements. Given that large GPS tracking losses occurred and few channels are allocated for BDS signals, it is expected that POD performance can be further improved by increasing the number of dual-frequency observations.
The Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) ultra-rapid precise orbits are crucial for global and wide-area real-time high-precision applications. The solar radiation pressure (SRP) model is an important factor in precise orbit determination. The real-time orbit determination is generally less accurate than the post-processed one and may amplify the instability and mismodeling of SRP models. Also, the impact of different SRP models on multi-GNSS real-time predicted orbits demands investigations. We analyzed the impact of the ECOM 1 and ECOM 2 models on multi-GNSS ultra-rapid orbit determination in terms of ambiguity resolution performance, real-time predicted orbit overlap precision, and satellite laser ranging (SLR) validation. The multi-GNSS observed orbital arc and predicted orbital arcs of 1, 3, 6, and 24 h are compared. The simulated real-time experiment shows that for GLONASS and Galileo ultra-rapid orbits, compared to ECOM 1, ECOM 2 increased the ambiguity fixing rate to 89.3% and 83.1%, respectively, and improves the predicted orbit accuracy by 9.2% and 27.7%, respectively. For GPS ultra-rapid orbits, ECOM 2 obtains a similar ambiguity fixing rate as ECOM 1 but slightly better orbit overlap precision. For BDS GEO ultra-rapid orbits, ECOM 2 obtains better overlap precision and SLR residuals, while for BDS IGSO and MEO ultra-rapid orbits, ECOM 1 obtains better orbit overlap precision and SLR residuals.
High precision real-time orbit of navigation satellites are usually predicted based on batch estimation solutions, which is highly dependent on the accuracy of the dynamic model. However, for the BDS satellites, the accuracy and reliability of the predicted orbit usually decrease due to the inaccurate dynamic model or orbit maneuvers. To improve this situation, the sequential estimation Square Root Information Filtering (SRIF) was applied to determine the real-time BDS orbits. In the filter algorithm, usually a long period is required for the orbit to converge to the final accuracy, due to lake of accurate initial state. This paper focuses on the impact of the initial state with different a priori Standard Deviation (STD) on the BDS orbit convergence performance in both normal and abnormal periods. For the normal period, the Ultra-Rapid (UR) orbit products and the Broadcast Ephemerides (BRDC) used as initial orbits are discussed respectively. For the abnormal period, orbit maneuver is analyzed. Experimental results show that a proper a priori STD of initial state can significantly accelerate the orbit convergence, while a loose a priori STD takes more than 10 h to converge in the radial direction for the BDS GEO/IGSO/MEO satellites. When the UR orbit product is used as the initial orbit, the orbit of the IGSO/MEO satellites can converge to decimeter-level immediately. When the BRDC product is used, the accuracy of meter-level can be obtained for the IGSO/MEO immediately, and converge to decimeter-level in about 6 h. For the period after the orbit maneuver, the real-time orbit accuracy can reach meter-level in about 6 h after the first group of broadcast ephemerides is received.