Initial Orbit Determination Results from the University of Luxembourg using Spire GNSS Tracking Data

CubeSats constellations using commercial off-the-shelf components have been studied for different applications, such as GNSS Radio Occultation (GNSS-RO). Furthermore, precise orbit determination of Low Earth Orbit (LEO) CubeSats based on multiple GNSS constellations would open new opportunities for scientific applications such as Earth’s gravity field measurements.

In GNSS kinematic orbit determination, which is the common method used for small sats, the derived orbits are affected by noise, data gaps, outliers, measurement errors as well as poor geometry of the observations. Our work seeks to mitigate these issues and we present two areas of research: 1) GNSS network processing of GPS and Galileo constellations and 2) kinematic orbit determination of a set of Spire CubeSats that host a GNSS-RO payload. An initial architecture of kinematic orbit processing for the Spire GNSS-RO CubeSats constellation is obtained and the details on validations and limitations are discussed in more details. In addition, we showcase the agreement between the GNSS orbit products produced at the University of Luxembourg (UL) with those of the Center for Orbit Determination in Europe (CODE). Finally, the Spire kinematic orbits based on the raw observation approach are derived and compared to the L1B Spire orbit products.