Long-Term GPS Satellite Orbit Prediction Scheme with Virtual Planet Perturbation

The purpose of this paper is to analyze GPS (Global Positioning System) satellite orbital mechanics, and then to propose a novel long-term GPS satellite orbit prediction scheme including virtual planet perturbation. The GPS orbital information is a necessary prerequisite to pinpointing the location of a GPS receiver. When a GPS receiver has been shut down for a long time, however, the time needed to fix it before its reuse is too long due to the long-standing GPS orbital information. To overcome this problem, the GPS orbital mechanics was studied, such as Newton`s equation of motion for the GPS satellite, including the non-spherical Earth effect, the luni-solar attraction, and residual perturbations. The residual perturbations are modeled as a virtual planet using the least-square algorithm for a moment. Through the modeling of the virtual planet with the aforementioned orbital mechanics, a novel GPS orbit prediction scheme is proposed. The numerical results showed that the prediction error was dramatically reduced after the inclusion of virtual planet perturbation.