The attitude regimes of the Jason-3 satellite can prove to be useful for the in-flight calibration of some POD instrument offsets. In particular, the flips performed around its yaw axis every 60 days when the solar beta-prime angle nullifies were used at the last 2019 OSTST meeting to identify, with SLR measurements, along-track biases in Jason-3 GPS-derived orbits, not seen in DORIS-based orbits.
In this paper, we focus on the capability of the flips to disentangle any miscentering of the orbit around the Earth’s CM from the combined effects of miscalibrated SRP models and POD instrument locations. We compare different approaches (flips method, Couhert et al. (2018, 2020)) and measurement configurations (GPS float/integer ambiguity and DORIS data) to determine the amplitude and phase of the geocenter motion in the Z (North-South) direction.