Precise Orbit Determination of BeiDou Satellites with Contributions from Chinese National Continuous Operating Reference Stations

The precise orbit determination (POD) for BeiDou satellites is usually limited by the insufficient quantity and poor distribution of ground tracking stations. To cope with this problem, this study used the GPS and BeiDou joint POD method based on Chinese national continuous operating reference stations (CNCORS) and IGS/MGEX stations. The results show that the 3D RMS of the differences of overlapping arcs is better than 22 cm for geostationary orbit (GEO) satellites and better than 10 cm for inclined geosynchronous orbit (IGSO) and medium earth orbit (MEO) satellites. The radial RMS is better than 2 cm for all three types of BeiDou satellites. The results of satellite laser ranging (SLR) residuals show that the RMS of the IGSO and MEO satellites is better than 5 cm, whereas the GEO satellite has a systematic bias. This study investigates the contributions of CNCORS to the POD of BeiDou satellites. The results show that after the incorporation of CNCORS, the precision of overlapping arcs of the GEO, IGSO, and MEO satellites is improved by 15.5%, 57.5%, and 5.3%, respectively. In accordance with the improvement in the precision of overlapping arcs, the accuracy of the IGSO and MEO satellites assessed by the SLR is improved by 30.1% and 4.8%, respectively. The computation results and analysis demonstrate that the inclusion of CNCORS yields the biggest contribution in the improvement of orbit accuracy for IGSO satellites, when compared to GEO satellites, while the orbit improvement for MEO satellites is the lowest due to their global coverage.