GPS Receivers for Shuttle Radar Topography Mission

Courtney Duncan, Willy Bertiger and Larry Young

Abstract:	The GPS Systems Group at JPL is providing a pair of new ‘Black Jack’ class TurboRogue Space Receivers (TRSR) for the Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM) to be flown in 1999. The mission will produce 3-D topographic maps of 85% of the earth's land surface (the area constrained by 57 south and 60 north latitudes) with 10 meter accuracy at 90% confidence (1.6 sigma) during an 11 day Space Shuttle mission. NASA's customer for these maps is NIMA. The GPS receivers and post processing provide the absolute state vector of the shuttle with respect to a fixed earth coordinate system with required accuracies of one meter position and five centimeter per second velocity during mapping operations. A redundant pair of receivers are used to ensure continuous data. Each receiver uses two antennas, one on an outboard radar antenna structure and the other at the edge of the shuttle payload bay. As resources permit, these will be used to estimate shuttle roll and yaw angles. The receivers measure the offset of radar time from GPS time. They are designed to operate properly within the electromagnetic environment of the transmitting radar. This paper provides an overview of SRTM, describes the receiver and post processing used to meet the positioning requirements and discusses program status, now in the early integration phase.
Published in:	Proceedings of the 54th Annual Meeting of The Institute of Navigation (1998) June 1 - 3, 1998 The Adams Mark Hotel Denver, CO
Pages:	145 - 155
Cite this article:	Duncan, Courtney, Bertiger, Willy, Young, Larry, "GPS Receivers for Shuttle Radar Topography Mission," Proceedings of the 54th Annual Meeting of The Institute of Navigation (1998), Denver, CO, June 1998, pp. 145-155.
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