Alex Conrad (University of Colorado, United States); Bruce Haines (Jet Propulsion Laboratory, United States)

The primary focus of this presentation is results from the radiometric evaluation of the TriG Precise Orbit Determination (POD) Global Positioning System (GPS) receiver onboard the Sentinel-6 Michael Freilich (MF) mission. We assess various tracking metrics, data noise, and precise orbit determination performance, and compare them to those from the Jason-3 IGOR+ GPS receiver. We also present results from the evaluation of our GPS-based POD solutions using independent metrics such as withheld satellite laser ranging data residuals and sea surface height residuals at locations where ascending and descending passes cross (i.e., crossover residuals). We also assess relative performance of our GPS-based Sentinel-6 MF and Jason-3 orbit solutions to the precise orbit ephemeris (POE) that is provided on the science data products. This performance assessment includes both temporal and geographically correlated differences.