ERS and Envisat orbit determination and prediction at ESOC

At the Flight Dynamics Division of the European Space Operations Centre (ESOC), routine operational orbit determination, prediction and control for ERS-1 and ERS-2 have been running consistently for many years now. The orbits produced on a daily basis are used for planning of ground track and inclination maintenance manoeuvres, for satellite operations (command parameters for the satellite’s Attitude and Orbit Control System / AOCS and for antenna pointing) and as input to the Fast Delivery (FD) product generation. In parallel, highprecision orbit determination (POD) has been performed off-line, partly for purposes of evaluation and improvement of the routine orbit determination, but also in support of the altimeter range calibration of ERS-2. This has been described extensively in earlier publications ([1], [2]).