Study of the Two-Line Element Accuracy by 1U CubeSat with a GPS Receiver

Abstract

There is a common practice to calculate orbital trajectories of space objects like satellites and space debris using Two-Line Element Sets (TLEs). However, TLEs provide rather coarse parameters for fine orbit computation and their precision varies with age of their issue and position of the satellite. The paper evaluates such induced position determination error using the comparison of a position calculated from TLE data for a small CubeSat class satellite and a position obtained from the on-board custom GPS receiver that is a part of such satellite payload. The analyses of the impact of satellite position at the orbit, i.e., a dependency of position error on satellite geographical latitude, and impact of the ageing of TLE data in frame of position and velocity vector were made. There was shown that use of TLE data can bring some significant errors in calculation of predicted satellite position which can affect performance and efficiency of some related tasks like steering the ground station antenna for communication with the satellite or planning the satellites operations namely for the classes of small and amateur satellites.