Determination of global geodetic parameters using satellite laser ranging to Galileo, GLONASS, and BeiDou satellites

Abstract

The new Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) satellites, including GLONASS, Galileo, and BeiDou system, are equipped with Laser Retroreflector Arrays (LRA) to support Satellite Laser Ranging (SLR) tracking, which contributes to the estimation of global geodetic parameters. In this study, we estimate the global geodetic parameters using the SLR observations to GNSS satellites and also investigate the effects of different data processing strategies on the estimated Earth Rotation Parameters (ERP), geocenter motion, and terrestrial scale. The results indicate that setting range bias parameters for each satellite-station pair can effectively account for the satellite-specific biases induced by LRAs, leading to smaller Root Mean Square Errors (RMSE) of the post-fit SLR residuals. Furthermore, estimating the range biases for each satellite-station pair improves the accuracy of the estimated station coordinates and ERP. We also examine the impact of different arc lengths on the estimates of ERP, geocenter motion, and terrestrial scale. The results show that extending arc length can significantly reduce the formal error of ERP. The 7-day strategy produces the smallest RMSEs of 473 microarcseconds and 495 microarcseconds for the estimated X- and Y-component of pole coordinates, and 52 microseconds for length-of-day, respectively. However, the estimated geocenter motion is less affected by the arc length, even the shortest 1-day arc strategy can capture the seasonal variations of geocenter motion in Z component. For scale estimation, extending the arc length notably improves the accuracy of the estimated station coordinates and scale, but this advantage becomes less noticeable in longer arcs. The 7-day solution also obtains the closet scale results compared to ITRF2014, with the RMSE of 2.10 × 10–9.