James S. Border

Precise GPS Orbit Determination Results from 1985 Field Tests

Data from three different receiver types have been used to obtain precise orbits for the satellites of the Global Positioning System (GPS). The data were collected during the 1985 March-April GPS experiment to test and validate GPS techniques for precision orbit determination and geodesy. A new software package developed at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), GIPSY (GPS Inferred Positioning SYstem), was used to process the data. To assess orbit accuracy, solutions are compared using integrated doppler data from various different receiver types, different fiducial sites, and independent data arcs, including one spanning six days. From these intercomparisons, orbit accuracy for a well-tracked GPS satellite of three meters in altitude and about five meters in each of down and cross-track components are inferred.