Research on the Calibration of Onboard Accelerometer by Dynamic Method

Abstract

For the new generation of satellite gravity missions, the observations of the onboard accelerometer can be calibrated by the dynamic method. In this paper, the strategy to calibrate the onboard accelerometer is studied in detail using the simulated precise orbit, and the impacts of the reference earth gravity model on the accelerometer calibration are discussed specifically. To evaluate the impacts of different strategies on the accelerometer calibration, the satellite orbit is integrated again with the calibrated accelerometer observations and the related dynamic models, and compared with the precise orbit. When the reference earth gravity model is fixed in the accelerometer calibration, the standard deviation of the differences between the re-integrated orbit and the simulated may be up to the order of meters, which shows that the reference earth gravity model has a significant effect on the accelerometer calibration. When the geopotential coefficients and the accelerometer calibration parameters are estimated simultaneously (simultaneous solution method in short), the accelerometer calibration parameters are independent of the reference earth gravity model. The results in this paper show that the simultaneous solution method is suitable for the calibration of the onboard accelerometer. It is also illustrated that to determinate the earth gravity model and the calibration parameters more reliably and accurately, we should choose an optimal maximum degree of the recovered earth gravity model. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2009.