Velocity and Acceleration of NavIC Satellites using Broadcast Ephemeris

Abstract

The current manuscript describes a methodology to derive velocity and acceleration of NavIC satellites from the broadcast ephemeris. A fourth-order central differencing formula is used to derive NavIC satellites’ Earth-Centred-Earth-Fixed (ECEF) velocity from the ECEF positions that are calculated using the standard IRNSS-SIS-ICD algorithm. The proposed methodology is quite simpler and straight forward than the conventional rotation matrix method and therefore it can be a very good alternative to the existing approaches. The same differencing formula has been further implemented to derive the ECEF acceleration form the ECEF velocities. Results obtained demonstrated that the satellites’ ECEF velocity can be approximated upto an accuracy of 0.6 mm/s while the ECEF acceleration can be of the further accuracy of within 0.06 mm/sec2 in each axis.

Keywords

• Velocity
• Acceleration
• Broadcast ephemeris
• Earth-Centred-Earth-Fixed
• NavIC