As published by ESA back on November 10th (www.esa.int/Our_Activities/Navigation/Galileo_satellite_set_for_new_orbit), Galileo satellite FM5 has been repositioned during the month of November into a more circular orbit, raising its perigee and reducing its eccentricity from an initial value of 0.23 to a target one of around 0.156 (as stated during last ION GNSS 2014 meeting by ESA).

Last Saturday, E18 satellite started transmitting (as advanced by @GNSS_news) and IGS’ MGEX network (http://igs.org/mgex/) is already tracking it. Based on the collected measurements during November 29th and 30th, and initial orbit and clock estimation for E18 has been performed by means of magicGNSS.

The 4 different clock intervals are shown below:

November 29th 06:15:00 to  November 29th 10:10:00:

After removing quadratic model adjustment:

November 30th 07:45:00 to  November 30th 12:25:00

After removing quadratic model adjustment:

November 30th 13:15:00 to  November 30th 19:25:00

After removing quadratic model adjustment:

November 30th 20:40:00 to  November 30th 23:55:00

After removing quadratic model adjustment:

We hope to better characterise E18 orbit over the next days as more data is available.

This entry was posted on Monday, December 1st, 2014 at 11:07 am and is filed under Announcements, Events. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.