Attitude Determination for GRACE-FO: Reprocessing the Level-1A SC and IMU Data

The satellite gravity mission GRACE(-FO) has not yet reached its designed baseline accuracy. Previous studies demonstrated that the deficiency in the sensor system or the related signal processing might be responsible, which in turn motivates us to keep revising the sensor data processing, typically the spacecraft’s attitude. Many efforts in the past have been made to enhance the attitude modeling for GRACE, for instance, the latest release reprocesses the attitude by fusing the angular acceleration with the star camera/tracker (SC) measurements, which helps to reduce the error in Level-2 temporal gravity fields. Therefore, in addition to GRACE, revising GRACE-FO attitude determination might make sense as well. This study starts with the most original raw GRACE-FO Level-1A data including those from three SCs and one IMU (Inertial Measurement Unit) sensors, and manage to generate a new publicly available Level-1B attitude product called HUGG-01 covering from June 2018 to December 2020, using our independently-developed software. The detailed treatment of individual payload is present in this study, and an indirect Kalman filter method is introduced to fuse the multiple sensors to acquire a relatively stable and precise attitude estimation. Unlike the direct SC combination method with a predefined weight as recommended in previous work, we propose an involvement of each SC measurement in the Kalman filter to enable a dynamic weight adjustment. Intensive experiments are further carried out to assess the HUGG-01, which demonstrate that the error level of HUGG-01 is entirely within the design requirement, i.e., the resulting KBR pointing variations are well controlled within 1 mrad (pitch), 5 mrad (roll) and 1 mrad (yaw). Moreover, comparisons with the official JPL-V04 attitude product demonstrate an equivalent performance in the low-to-middle spectrum, with even a slightly lower noise level (in the high spectrum) than JPL-V04. Further analysis on KBR range-rate residuals and gravity recovery on January 2019 indicates that, i.e., RMS of the difference (HUGG-01 minus JPL-V04) for the range rate is less than $3.234\times {10}^{-8}$ m/s, and the amplitude of geoid height difference is approximately $0.5$ cm. Both differences are below the sensitivity of the state-of-the-art satellite gravity mission, demonstrating a good agreement between HUGG-01 and JPL-V04.