CoAuthors

Claudia Flohrer (ESA/ESOC, Germany); Tim Springer (ESA/ESOC, Germany); Werner Enderle (ESA/ESOC, Germany)

Our presentation focuses on the new satellite Sentinel-3A and Jason-3. We will present the Sentinel-3A and Jason-3 orbits generated in 2016 at the European Space Operation Centre (ESOC). We will highlight the improvements that have been made in our software (NAPEOS) as well as in our satellite modelling since the last OSTST meeting.

Data of all three tracking instruments on-board the satellites, i.e., GPS, DORIS, and SLR measurements, were used in a combined data analysis. Beside presenting the orbit determination results we will also present the first results in trying to resolve integer ambiguities for these new satellites as was done for Jason-2 for the 2014 OSTST meeting.

We evaluate the orbit accuracy by analysing post-fit residuals, orbit overlap errors, and orbit differences between our orbits and external orbits generated by other analysis centres as well as showing altimeter crossover residuals. The consistency between our solutions and external orbits is below the 1 cm level in the radial direction, the most crucial component for altimetry height measurements.