Abstract: For formation-flying satellites, recent studies have reported that single receiver IAR by resolving the single-difference (SD) ambiguities between GNSS satellites at each individual formation-flying satellite cannot achieve the same relative orbit accuracy that is attained by double-difference (DD) IAR between formation-flying satellites. In this study, we have found that errors in the GPS clock and/or phase bias products may partly explain the degraded relative accuracy of SD-IAR. We therefore propose an integrated IAR scheme for formation flying satellites to enhance the orbit solutions. In the proposed integrated IAR scheme, SD-IAR is performed only at the reference formation-flying satellite, while DD-IAR is further accomplished between formation-flying satellites. To demonstrate the added value of the proposed IAR scheme, GPS data collected by the GRACE mission have been used.  Our results have showed that the integrated IAR-SD-DD scheme is able to provide the best absolute and relative orbit accuracies simultaneously.

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Guo, X., Geng, J., Chen, X. et al. (2020) Enhanced orbit determination for formation-flying satellites through integrated single- and double-difference GPS ambiguity resolution. GPS Solut: 24: 14. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10291-019-0932-1