GOCE star tracker attitude quaternion calibration and combination

We analyse the inter-boresight angles (IBA) measured by the star trackers on board the GOCE satellite and find that they exhibit small offsets of 7–9″ with respect to the ones calculated from the rotation of the star tracker reference frames to the satellite reference frame. Further, we find small variations in the offsets with a peak-to-peak amplitude of up to 8″, which correlate with variations of the star trackers’ temperatures. Motivated by these findings, we present a method for combining the attitude quaternions measured by two or more star trackers that includes an estimation of relative attitude offsets between star trackers as a linear function of temperature. The method was used to correct and combine the star tracker attitude quaternions within the reprocessing of GOCE data performed in 2018. We demonstrate that the IBA calculated from the corrected star tracker attitude quaternions show no significant offsets with respect to the reference frame information. Finally, we show that neglecting the star tracker attitude offsets in the processing would result in perturbations in the gravity gradients that are visible at frequencies below 2?mHz and have a magnitude of up to 90?mE. The presented method avoids such perturbations to a large extent.     

Swarm – An Earth Observation Mission investigating Geospace

The Swarm mission was selected as the 5th mission in ESA’s Earth Explorer Programme in 2004. This mission aims at measuring the Earth’s magnetic field with unprecedented accuracy. This will be done by a constellation of three satellites, where two will fly at lower altitude, measuring the gradient of the magnetic field, and one satellite will fly at higher altitude. The measured magnetic field is the sum of many contributions including both magnetic fields and currents in the Earth’s interior and electrical currents in Geospace. In order to separate all these sources electric field and plasma measurements will also be made to complement the primary magnetic field measurements. Together these will allow the deduction of information on a series of solid earth processes responsible for the creation of the fields measured. The completeness of the measurements on each satellite and the constellation aspect, however, implies simultaneous observations of a unique set of important electrodynamical parameters crucial for the understanding of the physical processes in Geospace, which are an important part of the objectives of the International Living With a Star Programme, ILWS. In this paper an overview of the Swarm science objectives, the mission concept, the scientific instrumentation, and the expected contribution to the ILWS programme will be summarized.     

VII: CLOSING SESSION: GOCE: ESA's First Earth Explorer Core Mission

This paper introduces the first ESA Core Earth Explorer mission, GOCE, in the context of ESA's Living Planet programme. GOCE will measure highly accurate, high spatial resolution differential accelerations in three dimensions along a well characterised orbit: the mission is planned for launch in early 2006. The mission objectives are to obtain gravity gradient data such that new global and regional models of the static Earth's gravity field and of the geoid can be deduced at length scales down to 100 km. These products will have broad application in the fields of geodesy, oceanography, solid-earth physics and glaciology. This revised version was published online in August 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.