Refining the Earth Orientation Parameters Onboard Spacecraft: Concept and Information Technologies

Abstract We consider the problem of refining the evolving Earth Orientation Parameters (EOP) used during the converting from the inertial coordinate system to the Earth’s coordinate system, including ephemerides computations onboard spacecraft (SC). We discuss the approaches and technologies used to refine these parameters. We propose a concept to refine EOP by ground stations and SC, based on processing the measurements of the distance between the ground station and SC by the least squares method (LSM). We provide mathematical models, refining algorithms, and the results of their application in experiments simulating refining processes for parameters of the EOP onboard SC.