Engineering topics
Publications and source records attributed to Kruizinga, G..
The two GRACE (Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment) spacecraft were launched into a near polar circular orbit around the earth in March of 2002. The two spacecraft serve as test masses to measure the Earth's gravitational field.
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The Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment launched March 17, 2002. The GPS data for this experiment are processed to contribute to the recover long wavelength gravity field; remove errors due to long term on-board oscillator drift; and align K/Ka-band measurments between the two spacecraft to 0.1 ns. This paper will concentrate on the use of GPS for these timing and calibration functions and will not address the recovery of the gravity field.
This paper will describe the design and on-orbit performance of the GRACE Instrument Processing Unit (IPU) that integrates most of the critical science functions required by the GRACE mission to perform its gravity science and atmospheric radio occultation tasks.
In this paper we present results for CHAMP POD using the precise GPS measurements collected by the BlackJack receiver through the up-looking antenna. We will describe the quality of the tracking data, the tuning of the reduced-dynamic model for the 400-km orbit, and the various methods of evaluating the orbit accuracy.