Precise Relative Positioning for Formation Flying Satellite using GPS Carrier-phase Measurements

The present paper deals with precise relative positioning of formation satellites with long baseline in low Earth orbit making use of L1/L2 dual frequency GPS carrier phase measurements. Kinematic approach means to describe the motion of objects without taking its mass/dynamics model into consideration. The advantage of the kinematic approach is that information about dynamics of the system is not applied, which gives more flexibility and could improve the scientific interest of the observations made by the mission. The ionosphere terms, which are not canceled by double differenced measurement equation in the case of the long baseline, are explicitly estimated as unknown parameters by extended Kalman filter. The estimated float ambiguities by EKF are solved by existing efficient integer vector search strategy under integer least square condition. For the integer vector search, we employ well known MLAMBDA. Finally, The feasibility and accuracy of processing scheme are demonstrated using the GPS measurements for two satellites in low Earth orbit separated by baselines of 100 km.