POGO satellite orbit corrections: An opportunity to improve the quality of the geomagnetic field measurements?

Abstract

We present an attempt to improve the quality of the geomagnetic field measurements from the Polar Orbiting Geophysical Observatory (POGO) satellite missions in the late 1960s. Inaccurate satellite positions are believed to be a major source of errors for using the magnetic observations for field modelling. To improve the data, we use an iterative approach consisting of two main parts: one is a main field modelling process to obtain the radial field gradient to perturb the orbits and the other is the state-of-the-art GPS orbit modelling software BERNESE to calculate new physical orbits. We report results based on a single-day approach showing a clear increase of the data quality. That single-day approach leads, however, to undesirable orbital jumps at midnight. Furthermore, we report results obtained for a much larger data set comprising almost all of the data from the three missions. With this approach, we eliminate the orbit discontinuities at midnight but only tiny quality improvements could be achieved for geomagnetically quiet data. We believe that improvements to the data are probably still possible, but it would require the original tracking observations to be found.