Print Email Facebook Twitter Calibration and validation of individual GOCE accelerometers by precise orbit determination Title Calibration and validation of individual GOCE accelerometers by precise orbit determination Author Visser, P.N.A.M. Van den IJssel, J.A.A. Faculty Aerospace Engineering Department Space Engineering Date 2014-09-14 Abstract The European Space Agency Gravity field and steady-state Ocean Circular Explorer (GOCE) carries a gradiometer consisting of three pairs of accelerometers in an orthogonal triad. Precise GOCE science orbit solutions (PSO), which are based on satellite-to-satellite tracking observations by the Global Positioning System and which are claimed to be at the few cm precision level, can be used to calibrate and validate the observations taken by the accelerometers. This has been done for each individual accelerometer by a dynamic orbit fit of the time series of position co-ordinates from the PSOs, where the accelerometer observations represent the non-gravitational accelerations. Since the accelerometers do not coincide with the center of mass of the GOCE satellite, the observations have to be corrected for rotational and gravity gradient terms. This is not required when using the so-called common-mode accelerometer observations, provided the center of the gradiometer coincides with the GOCE center of mass. Dynamic orbit fits based on these common-mode accelerations therefore served as reference. It is shown that for all individual accelerometers, similar dynamic orbit fits can be obtained provided the above-mentioned corrections are made. In addition, accelerometer bias estimates are obtained that are consistent with offsets in the gravity gradients that are derived from the GOCE gradiometer observations. Subject GOCEaccelerometercalibrationvalidationprecise orbit determinationbiasdriftgravity gradients To reference this document use: http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:a48a4b5c-ec07-4680-98b2-bcf2659e5451 Publisher Springer ISSN 0949-7714 Source https://doi.org/10.1007/s00190-015-0850-0 Source Journal of Geodesy, 2015 Part of collection Institutional Repository Document type journal article Rights © 2015 The Author(s)This article is published with open access at Springerlink.com Files PDF Visser_2015.pdf 3.87 MB Close viewer /islandora/object/uuid:a48a4b5c-ec07-4680-98b2-bcf2659e5451/datastream/OBJ/view