Simulation-based evaluation of a cold atom interferometry gradiometer concept for gravity field recovery

Abstract The prospects of future satellite gravimetry missions to sustain a continuous and improved observation of the gravitational field have stimulated studies of new concepts of space inertial sensors with potentially improved precision and stability. This is in particular the case for cold-atom interferometry (CAI) gradiometry which is the object of this paper. The performance of a specific CAI gradiometer design is studied here in terms of quality of the recovered gravity field through a closed-loop numerical simulation of the measurement and processing workflow. First we show that mapping the time-variable field on a monthly basis would require a noise level below 5 mE / Hz . The mission scenarios are therefore focused on the static field, like GOCE. Second, the stringent requirement on the angular velocity of a one-arm gradiometer, which must not exceed 10 - 6  rad/s, leads to two possible modes of operation of the CAI gradiometer: the nadir and the quasi-inertial mode. In the nadir mode, which corresponds to the usual Earth-pointing satellite attitude, only the gradient V yy , along the cross-track direction, is measured. In the quasi-inertial mode, the satellite attitude is approximately constant in the inertial reference frame and the 3 diagonal gradients V xx , V yy and V zz are measured. Both modes are successively simulated for a 239 km altitude orbit and the error on the recovered gravity models eventually compared to GOCE solutions. We conclude that for the specific CAI gradiometer design assumed in this paper, only the quasi-inertial mode scenario would be able to significantly outperform GOCE results at the cost of technically challenging requirements on the orbit and attitude control.