Forward and inverse analyses of GPS radio occultations in the neutral atmosphere
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Engineering topics
Publications and source records attributed to Iijima, B. A..
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This paper talks about how 2 spacecraft launches add two new instrumetns for climate monitoring and GPS radio occultations.
The ionospheric storm evolution process was monitored during the January 10, 1997 magnetic cloud event, through measurements of the inonospheric total electron content (TEC) from 150 GPS stations. The first significant response of the inonospheric TEC to the geomagnetic storm was at 0300 UT as an auroral/subauroral enhancement around the Alaskan evening sector.
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A globally distributed network of dual-frequency GPS receivers currently exists and enables the monitoring of ionospheric total electron content (TEC) on global scales.
The Federal Aviation Administration's wide-area augmentation system (WAAS) for GPS positioning requires near real-time calibration of ionospheric vertical delays at a set of Earth-fixed grid points.
Many planned and proposed NASA science activities will benefit from precise real time positioning with wide area differential GPS (WADGPS). Future NASA users include orbital remote sensing instruments (altimeters, SARs, imagers) and a variety of airborne and Earth based investigations. Real time positioning requirements and goals range from a few meters to a few centimeters. Direct benefits will include the enabling of missions that are not now possible (such as precision remote sensing from the space shuttle and space station) and dramatic reduction of analysis costs for a diversity of current investigations.
In an ongoing effort to improve the knowledge of the relative orientation (the 'frame tie') of the planetary ephemeris reference frame used in deep navigation and a second reference frame that is defined by the coordinates of a set of extragalactic radio sources, VLBI observations of the Soviet Phobos-2 spacecraft and nearby (in angle) radio sources were obtained at two epochs in 1989, shortly after the spacecraft entered orbit about Mars. The frame tie is an important systematic error source affecting both interplanetary navigation and the process of improving the theory of the Earth's orientation. The data from a single Phobos-2 VLBI session measure one component of the direction vector from Earth to Mars in the frame of the extragalactic radio sources (the 'radio frame'). The radio frame has been shown to be stable and internally consistent with an accuracy of 5 nrad. The planetary ephemeris reference frame has an internal consistency of approximately 15 nrad. The planetary and radio source reference frames were aligned prior to 1989 and measurements of occulations of the radio source 3C273 by the Moon. The Phobos-2 VLBI measurements provide improvement in the accuracy of two of the three angles describing a general rotation between the planetary and radio reference frames. A complete set of measurements is not available because data acquisition was terminated prematurely by loss of spacecraft. The analysis of the two Phobos-2 VLBI data sets indicates that, in the directions of the two rotation components determined by these data, the JPL planetary ephemeris DE200 is aligned with the radio frame as adopted by the International Earth Rotation Service within an accuracy of 20-40 nrad, depending on direction. The limiting errors in the solutions for these offsets are spacecraft trajectory (20 nrad), instrumental biases (19 nrad), and dependence of quasar coordinates on observing frequency (24 nrad).
This article discusses results of the first very long baseline interferometric (VLBI) measurements between antennas of the NASA DSN and the Russian three-station spacecraft tracking network. The VLBI systems of the U.S. and Russian tracking networks are described, and their compatibility for joint U.S.-Russian measurements is discussed. The results of a series of VLBI measurements involving Deep Space Stations and Russian tracking antennas are presented. The purpose of these first observations is to establish the compatibility of the two VLBI recording systems and verify that data recorded on these systems can be successfully correlated. The delay and delay rate observables produced by correlation of the recorded data are then used to estimate the locations of the Russian tracking stations relative to the Deep Space Stations. These first experiments, carried out at 1.7 GHz, are precursors to a future series of observations at 2 and 8 GHz, which will provide far more accurate station location estimates. The capability of the VLBI systems for joint U.S.-Russian spacecraft navigation measurements is also discussed.