the dedicated satellite mission goce will sense various small mass variations along its path around the earth. here we study the effect of the earth’s topography and atmosphere on goce data. the effects depend on the magnitude of topographic height, and they will therefore vary by region. as the effect of the atmosphere and topography must be removed from the total gravity anomaly prior to geoi...

Simulation tests were accomplished in this paper to evaluate the performance of gravity matching aided navigation (GMAN). Four essential factors were focused in this study to quantitatively evaluate the performance: gravity database (DB) resolution, fitting degree of gravity measurements, number of samples in matching, and gravity changes in the matching area. Marine gravity anomaly DB derived ...

The launch of SELENE, which acquired the first direct tracking data over the farside of the Moon by the use of 4-way Doppler data between a relay satellite and the main satellite, has resulted in a dramatic improvement of the knowledge of the global lunar gravity field[1,2]. In addition to the 4-way Doppler data, same-beam differential VLBI data between the two sub-satellites and two stations o...

Applications involving multi-satellite altimetry (such as from ERS, TOPEX/Poseidon and, in the near future GFO) require that any differences between the altimetric databases are either negligible, resolvable by simple spatial approximations or eliminated by enhancement through dual satellite crossovers. Although orbit error for satellites such as ERS-2 has been considerably reduced over the yea...

The computation of spherical harmonic coefficients of the Earth’s gravity field from satellite-to-satellite tracking (SST) data and satellite gravity gradiometry (SGG) data is considered. As long as the functional model related to SST data contains nuisance parameters (e.g. unknown initial state vectors), assembling of the corresponding normal matrix must be supplied with the back-substitution ...

gravity recovery and climate experiment (grace) satellite gravimetry mission launched in march 2002 based on its twin gravimetric satellites makes application of both high-low (hl) and law-low (ll) gravimetric techniques possible. the ll is based on satellite-to-satellite tracking (sst) via the one way two frequencies k-band-ranging between the two grace satellites. as a result of combination o...

The determination of the Earth’s gravity field is the main goal of the dedicated gravity field missions CHAMP, GRACE and GOCE. The gravity field comprises always a static part and a much smaller timevariable one in the order of millimeters to centimeters, if expressed in geoid heights. As the measurements always consist of both parts, one has to separate them to get a highly accurate static fie...