Kristine M Larson et al 2007 Metrologia 44 484 doi:10.1088/0026-1394/44/6/007
Kristine M Larson1,5, Neil Ashby2, Christine Hackman3 and Willy Bertiger4
Show affiliationsThe GRACE mission consists of two identical satellites orbiting the Earth at an altitude of ~500 km. Dual-frequency carrier-phase Global Positioning System (GPS) receivers are flying on both satellites. They are used for precise orbit determination and to time-tag the K-band ranging system used to measure changes in the distances between the two satellites. The satellites are also flying ultra-stable oscillators (USOs) to achieve the mission's need for short-term (<1 s) oscillator stability. Because of the high quality of both the GPS receivers and the oscillators, relativistic effects in the GRACE GPS data can be examined. An expression is developed for relativistic effects that explicitly includes the effects of the Earth's oblateness (J2). Use of this expression significantly reduces the twice per orbital period energy in the GRACE clock solutions, indicating that the effect of J2 can be significant and should be modeled for satellite clocks in low Earth orbit. After relativistic effects have been removed, both GRACE USOs show large (2 ns to 3 ns) once per orbital period signatures that correlate with voltage variations on the spacecraft.
95.40.+s Artificial Earth satellites
Issue 6 (December 2007)
Received 25 January 2007
Published 7 November 2007
Kristine M Larson et al 2007 Metrologia 44 484
Charles A Greenhall 2008 Metrologia 45 27
T Pohl et al 2004 J. Phys. B: At. Mol. Opt. Phys. 37 L183
R Metzler 2005 J. Phys. A: Math. Gen. 38 1830
Neil V Budko and Rob F Remis 2004 Inverse Problems 20 S17
Benoît Saussol and Jun Wu 2003 Nonlinearity 16 1991
R R R Reis et al 2005 Class. Quantum Grav. 22 353
Tamas Nemeth and Kenneth P Bube 2001 Inverse Problems 17 533
K. Gokhberg et al 2005 Europhys. Lett. 72 228
Hong Zhou et al 2005 Nonlinearity 18 2815