Quantitative analysis of the errors associated with orbit uncertainty for FORMOSAT-3

The FORMOSAT-3/COSMIC mission is a micro satellite mission to deploy a constellation of six micro satellites at low Earth orbits. The final mission orbit is of an altitude of 750-800 lan. It is a collaborative Taiwan-USA science experiment. Each satellite consists of three science payloads in which the GPS occultation experiment (GOX) payload will collect the GPS signals for the studies of meteorology, climate, space weather, and geodesy. The GOX onboard FORMOSAT -3 is designed as a GPS receiver with 4 antennas. The fore and aft limb antennas are installed on the front and back sides, respectively, and as well as the two precise orbit determination (POD) antennas. The precise orbit information is needed for both the occultation inversion and geodetic research. However, the instrument associated errors, such as the antenna phase center offset and even the different cable delay due to the geometric configuration of fore- and aft-positions of the POD antennas produce error on the orbit. Thus, the focus of this study is to investigate the impact of POD antenna parameter on the determination of precise satellite orbit. Furthermore, the effect of the accuracy of the determined satellite orbit on the retrieved atmospheric and ionospheric parameters is also examined. The CHAMP data, the FORMOSAT-3 satellite and orbit parameters, the Bernese 5.0 software, and the occultation data processing system are used in this work. The results show that 8 cm error on the POD antenna phase center can result in ~8 cm bias on the determined orbit and subsequently cause 0.2 K deviation on the retrieved atmospheric temperature at altitudes above 10 lan.