The Navigation Office at ESOC has been closely involved in all aspects of the Precise Orbit Determination (POD) of Envisat throughout the mission lifetime. These activities started shortly after launch through membership of the Orbit Validation Team (OVT). During this time ESOC was involved in both calibration and validation of the DORIS doppler data, the SLR data and the different POD solution...

This article presents a new technology for satellite orbit determination using a simple Global Positioning System (GPS) receiver (microGPS) with ultra-low cost, power, and mass. The capability of low-cost orbit determination with microGPS for a low Earth-orbiting satellite, Student Nitric Oxide Explorer (SNOE), is demonstrated using actual GPS data from the GPS/Meteorology (MET) satellite. The ...

Existing definitions for optimal orbit determination are not satisfactory. Any useful definition must explicitly address questions relating to sequential processing, linearization, performance function and its extremalization, state estimate structure completeness, use of physics in applicable stochastic processes, and criteria for validation. Such a definition is presented.

Satellite autonomous orbit determination OD is a complex process using filtering method to integrate observation and orbit dynamic equations effectively and estimate the position and velocity of a satellite. Therefore, the filtering method plays an important role in autonomous orbit determination accuracy and time consumption. Extended Kalman filter EKF , unscented Kalman filter UKF , and unsce...

In dynamic orbit determination, the problem is that a batch estimator assumes use of more sophisticated models for both force and observation models, dealing with large amounts of observations. As a result, the computational workload may not be acceptable for onboard orbit determination. In this paper, the short-arc batch estimation is experimentally studied in order to address both estimation ...

In this work we study the basic aspects concerning the stability of the outer satellites of Jupiter. Including the effects of the four giant planets and the Sun we study a large grid of initial conditions. Some important regions where satellites cannot survive are found. Basically these regions are due to Kozai and other resonances. We give an analytical explanation for the libration of the per...

Integrations in fixed N-body realisations of smooth density distributions corresponding to a chaotic galactic potential can be used to derive reliable estimates of the largest (finite time) Lyapunov exponent χS associated with an orbit in the smooth potential generated from the same initial condition, even though the N -body orbit is typically characterised by an N -body exponent χN χS. This ca...