Abstract
A numerical study has been conducted in order to analyze under what conditions temporal variations of the Earth’s gravity field can be recovered from the orbit of a satellite that is not equipped with an accelerometer. In the study, the motion of one of GRACE satellites was reproduced. A variant of the acceleration approach was used to process the simulated data. It turned out that the presence of non-gravitational satellite accelerations does not obscure temporal gravity field variations, provided that the satellite orbit (and, consequently, the set of observed satellite accelerations) is noise-free. Therefore, inaccuracies of the orbit determination is the only reason why a satellite orbit cannot be used to monitor temporal gravity field variations. It is shown that these inaccuracies should be reduced 30–100 times with respect to the level reached currently for the CHAMP and GRACE mission. Of course, a simultaneous utilization of data from several satellites can make this requirement less stringent
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Ditmar, P., Bezdek, A., Liu, X., Zhao, Q. (2009). On a Feasibility of Modeling Temporal Gravity Field Variations from Orbits of Non-dedicated Satellites. In: Sideris, M.G. (eds) Observing our Changing Earth. International Association of Geodesy Symposia, vol 133. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-85426-5_36
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-85426-5_36
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