A Differential GPS Correction Method for the Position Determination of a Sounding Rocket

Jyh-Ching Juang and Yung-Fu Tsai

Abstract:	In the paper, a differential GPS correction method is proposed for a sounding rocket experiment. DGPS schemes are known to be capable of removing common-mode errors between GPS receivers that are in vicinity. However, for a sounding rocket that could reach into the ionosphere, the standard differential correction method including local-area differential correction and wide-area differential correction may not be directly applicable due to the de-correlation between the on-board receiver and the receiver on ground as well as the limitation of the thin-shell model in modeling the ionospheric delay. In this paper, a differential correction scheme is proposed and applied to a sounding rocket program. The proposed scheme relies on the establishment of altitude-dependent ionospheric and tropospheric correction terms for GPS raw measurements. Together with rocket kinematics, a filtering solution of the rocket trajectory is obtained. In the paper, the data collection process is delineated and the post-processing results of a sounding rocket experiment are reported.
Published in:	Proceedings of the 18th International Technical Meeting of the Satellite Division of The Institute of Navigation (ION GNSS 2005) September 13 - 16, 2005 Long Beach Convention Center Long Beach, CA
Pages:	1174 - 1179
Cite this article:	Juang, Jyh-Ching, Tsai, Yung-Fu, "A Differential GPS Correction Method for the Position Determination of a Sounding Rocket," Proceedings of the 18th International Technical Meeting of the Satellite Division of The Institute of Navigation (ION GNSS 2005), Long Beach, CA, September 2005, pp. 1174-1179.
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