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

Our presentation focuses on the new Jason-1 and Jason-2 orbits generated in 2014 at the European Space Operation Centre ESOC. The main improvement compared to the orbits presented at previous OSTST meetings is that we now resolve for integer ambiguities for Jason-1 and Jason-2. The orbits are generated in the ITRF2008 reference frame with the NAPEOS software which is fully compliant with the latest IERS2010 conventions.

Data of all three tracking instruments on-board the satellites, i.e. GPS, DORIS, and SLR measurements, were used in a combined data analysis. About 10 years of Jason-1 data and about 6 years of Jason-2 data were processed. We present the orbit determination results, focusing on the effect of fixing the integer ambiguities on the solution.

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.