Gravity field recovery from orbit information using the Lagrange formalism

Abstract

Gravity field reconstruction via the analysis of kinematic orbit positions has  been proven to provide essential information for Earth system research  purposes. For this aim, various approaches have been developed and applied to  exploit kinematic orbits. In addition to those existing methods, in this paper we present a new technique. By means of a series of simulation studies we  demonstrate that the novel method is comparable with the hitherto proposed  techniques. As the main difference with existing methods, our approach is based on the  so-called Lagrange coefficients, i.e., a semi-analytical description of the  satellite motion. For this reason, we denote the technique to as the Lagrange  formalism. The low sensitivity to the priori information about the gravity field, and less influence of the polar gap are of its characteristics. The investigations demonstrate that the idea of the Lagrange method in determining the Earth's gravity field could represent comparable results in term of quality with other approaches.