GRACE-FO accelerometer data recovery within ITSG-Grace2018 data processing

In GRACE-FO (Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment Follow-on) mission, similar to its predecessor GRACE, the twin satellites are equipped with three-axis accelerometers, measuring the non-gravitational forces. After one month in orbit, the GRACE-D accelerometer data degraded and its measurements were replaced by synthetic accelerometer data, the so-called transplant data, officially generated by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). The transplant data was derived from the GRACE-C accelerometer measurements, by applying a time and attitude corrections and adding model-based residual accelerations due to thruster firings on GRACE-D.

For the ITSG-Grace2018 GRACE-FO release, the gravity field recovery is based on the use of in-house Level-1B accelerometer data (ACT1B) using the provided Level-1A data products. In this work, we present a novel approach to recover the ACT1B data by (a) implementing the state-of-the-art non-gravitational force models and (b) applying additional force model corrections.

The preliminary results show the improved ACT1B data not only contributed to a noise reduction but also improved the estimates of the C20 and C30 coefficients. We show that the offset between SLR (Satellite Laser Ranging) and GRACE-FO derived C20 and C30 time series can be reduced remarkably by the use of the new accelerometer product, demonstrating the merit of this new approach.