Valuable insights into the thermospheric mass density and horizontal winds can be obtained from satellites equipped with accelerometers. To derive these quantities, radiation pressure must be accurately modeled and removed from the calibrated accelerometer measurements. However, the documented surface reflection and absorption coefficients, as well as the satellite’s thermal properties, are often inaccurate or, in some cases, even absent. This study presents a method for optimizing these parameters jointly with the accelerometer scale factors. Focusing on GRACE data from 2009, a case where radiation pressure was dominant over aerodynamic force, enabled us to refine the radiation pressure model without detrimental effects from errors in aerodynamic force modeling. We evaluated three variants of estimating the scale factor: estimating no accelerometer scale factors, only the y-axis scale factor, or both the y- and z-axis scale factors. We use the difference between the measured and modeled accelerations (the residual) as our target functional. Estimating both scale factors yielded the lowest residual for both GRACE satellites, even though the radiation pressure model was tuned using GRACE-A data only. After the optimization, we observed a systematic feature in the cross-track residuals within the geographical domain, which strongly correlates with the magnetic field vector experienced by the spacecraft. While its cause remains unknown, we introduced an empirical correction that effectively removed the feature and significantly increased consistency between GRACE-A and GRACE-B. Overall, we were able to reduce the RMS of the residuals by more than 13% in the cross-track direction and 32% in the radial direction, indicating a significant increase in modeling accuracy. The presented method provides a generalizable approach that can also be applied to future satellite missions with accelerometers.
Jacobs et al. (Wed,) studied this question.