FedSat Orbit Determination Strategies and Results From The Dailly Flight GPS Measurements

Y. Feng, N. Zhou, W. Enderle

Abstract:	The Australian Federation Satellite, FedSat, was successfully launched into a 780-km low-earth orbit on 14 December 2002. Since March 2003, the onboard Blackjack GPS receiver has operated on a duty cycle basis, providing effective data sets at an average of 10 to 15 minutes per orbit with its only aft-looking antenna, which views a field of two-third of the hemisphere. This paper presents the technical description of the FedSat Orbit Determination and Tracking (FODT) software, which is used to perform FedSat orbit filtering and prediction on daily basis. In this paper, we present the results from GPS flight data sets of two periods: the very first 24 hour data collected on Day 364/02 and the very first data sets of 5 consecutive days in March 2003. The analysis is focused on the evaluation of the FedSat flight GPS data quality and the accuracy of orbit propagation solutions currently achievable with the FODT software. The results from the two data periods have shown that the FODT derived FedSat orbits from code measurements can be propagated forward 72 and 96 hours with the maximal orbit errors of 120m and 240m respectively, which will satisfy the precise pointing requirement for Ka-Band tracking. In general, these preliminary FedSat orbit determination results are considered encouraging and promising, given consideration of rather harsh FedSat observational environment.
Published in:	Proceedings of the 16th International Technical Meeting of the Satellite Division of The Institute of Navigation (ION GPS/GNSS 2003) September 9 - 12, 2003 Oregon Convention Center Portland, OR
Pages:	2248 - 2254
Cite this article:	Feng, Y., Zhou, N., Enderle, W., "FedSat Orbit Determination Strategies and Results From The Dailly Flight GPS Measurements," Proceedings of the 16th International Technical Meeting of the Satellite Division of The Institute of Navigation (ION GPS/GNSS 2003), Portland, OR, September 2003, pp. 2248-2254.
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