Gravitational Force Model Aliasing with Nongravitational Force Coefficients in Dynamic Prediction

What is it about?

In the process of determining a satellite's location in orbit, certain parameters related to forces exerted by the Earth's atmosphere and Sun's radiation on the satellite are not accurately known. Therefore, they need to be determined along with the satellite position and velocity using measurements of the satellite location such as from GPS. This is important since knowledge of these parameters allows us to predict where the satellite will be in the future. In addition, the accuracy of these parameters directly affects applications such as atmospheric modeling. In this work, we show that the model used for Earth's gravitational field in determining the satellite's states (position and velocity) plays a significant role in limiting the accuracy with which these parameters can be determined.

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