Abstract
The Sentinel-6 Michael Freilich altimetry mission flies two GNSS receivers: a primary multi-GNSS (GPS plus Galileo) PODRIX receiver and a GPS-only TriG receiver. Each of these receivers is independently capable of supporting the precise orbit determination (POD) requirement for < 1.5 cm radial rms error. In this study, we characterize the performance of single-receiver solutions and evaluate the benefits of a combined TriG and PODRIX orbit solution. The availability of both sets of receiver observations revealed a 10 mm in-track difference between orbit solutions derived independently from TriG and PODRIX tracking data. Based on satellite laser ranging (SLR) residuals, this bias has been isolated to an apparent inconsistency between the estimated TriG receiver clock and observation time-tags of approximately 1.3 $$\mu \hbox {s}$$ μ s , which is equivalent to a common range error of roughly 400 m in the TriG observations. After applying this calibration, the TriG and PODRIX displayed similar performance in terms of orbit overlap precision. PODRIX-Galileo observations showed lower code and phase tracking residual rms values compared to the GPS observations. Overall, processing the calibrated TriG and PODRIX observations separately results in highly accurate orbit solutions with radial orbit accuracies better than 1 cm rms as indicated by one-way SLR residual rms of 7.2 mm or better for each solution. Orbit solution accuracy is slightly improved by processing both TriG and PODRIX observations together, resulting in one-way SLR residual rms of 7.0 mm.