The physical investigations on the accuracy improvement to the measurement of the Earth＇s gravity field recovery are carried out based on the next-generation Pendulum-A/B out-of-plane twin-satellite formation in this paper. Firstly, the Earth＇s gravity field complete up to degree and order 100 is, respectively, recovered by the collinear and pendulum satellite formations using the orbital parameters of the satellite and the matching accuracies of key payloads from the twin GRACE satellites. The research results show that the accuracy of the Earth＇s gravity field model from the Pendulum-A/B satellite formation is about two times higher than from the collinear satellite formation, and the further improvement of the determination accuracy of the Earth＇s gravity field model is feasible by the next-generation Pendulum-A/B out-of-plane twin-satellite formation. Secondly, the Earth＇s gravity field from Pendulum-A/B complete up to degree and order 100 is accurately recovered based on the orbital parameters of the satellite （e.g., an orbital altitude of 400 km, an intersatellite range of 100 km, an orbital inclination of 89° and an orbital eccentricity of 0.001）, the matching accuracies of space- borne instruments （e.g. 10-6 m in the intersatellite range, 10-3 m in the orbital position, 10-6 m/s in orbital velocity, and 10-11 m/s2 in non-conservative force）, an observation time of 30 days and a sampling interval of 10 s. The measurement accuracy of the Earth＇s gravity field from the next-generation Pendulum-A/B out-of-plane twin-satellite formation is full of promise for being improved by about l0 times compared with that from the current GRACE satellite formation. Finally, the physical requirements for the next-generation Pendulum-A/B out-of-plane twin-satellite formation are analyzed, and it is proposed that the satellite orbital altitude be preferably designed to be close to 400±50 km and the matching precision of key sensors from the Pendulum-A/B mission be about one order of magnitude higher tha
Firstly, a new analytical error model of the cumulative geoid height using the three-dimensional diagonal tensors of satellite gravity gradiometry （SGG） is introduced based on the variance-covariance matrix principle. Secondly, a study for the requirements demonstration on the next-generation GOCE Follow-On satellite gravity gradiometry system is developed using different satellite orbital altitudes and measurement accuracies of satellite gravity gradiometer by the new analytical error model of SGG. The research results show that it is preferable to design satellite orbital altitudes of 300 km–400km and choose the measurement accuracies of 10-13/s2 –10-15/s2 from satellite gravity gradiometer. Finally, the complementarity of the four-stage satellite gravity missions, including past CHAMP, current GRACE, and GOCE, and next-generation GOCE Follow-On, is contrastively demonstrated for precisely recovering the Earth’s full-frequency gravitational field with high spatial resolution.
