Performance Assessment of the Radio Occultation Experiment for Commercial of-the-shelf Receivers on VELOX-CI Microsatellite

Bing-Xuan Li, Bo Han, Wee Seng Lim, Yung-Fu Tsai, Kay-Soon Low

Abstract:	VELOX-CI is the second micro satellite of Satellite Research Center (SaRC) in Nanyang Technological University [1, 2]. Since its launch on Dec. 16, 2015, VELOX-CI has performed a total of 136 radio occultation (RO) missions, and collected 448 hours’ GPS data with the lowest penetration altitude of 6 km. In this paper the radio occultation performance of the VELOX-CI’s COTS receiver and the space-borne receivers are compared in the upper troposphere (10~60km) in tropical region (latitude between 30°N and 30°S). VELOX-CI is designed to explore the potential of using the commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) GPS receivers for RO mission for the first time. The satellite has a near equatorial orbit with an altitude of 550km. Three GPS antennas are located at the zenith, forward-velocity, and after-velocity directions. The tracked GPS signal phase, carrier-to-noise ratio C/N0 are stored and sent to ground for post processing. The ionospheric profiles and preliminary tropospheric profiles are presented previously in [3, 4]. In this paper, the VELOX-CI’s GPS RO payload is described. The RO data inversion procedures are introduced and a refractivity profile comparison study is made for refractive index obtained with VELOX-CI RO, radiosonde measurements and COSMIC data.
Published in:	Proceedings of the 30th International Technical Meeting of the Satellite Division of The Institute of Navigation (ION GNSS+ 2017) September 25 - 29, 2017 Oregon Convention Center Portland, Oregon
Pages:	1669 - 1677
Cite this article:	Li, Bing-Xuan, Han, Bo, Lim, Wee Seng, Tsai, Yung-Fu, Low, Kay-Soon, "Performance Assessment of the Radio Occultation Experiment for Commercial of-the-shelf Receivers on VELOX-CI Microsatellite," Proceedings of the 30th International Technical Meeting of the Satellite Division of The Institute of Navigation (ION GNSS+ 2017), Portland, Oregon, September 2017, pp. 1669-1677. https://doi.org/10.33012/2017.15157
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