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The combination of satellite laser ranging (SLR) observations to various low earth orbit (LEO) satellites can enhance the accuracy and robustness of SLR-derived geodetic parameters, benefiting the realization of the International terrestrial reference frames. Observation stochastic models play a critical role in the integrated processing of SLR observations to multiple LEO satellites. The consideration of precision in heterogeneous SLR observations from various satellites is essential. In this study, we aim to improve the combination of multi-LEO SLR observations for geodetic parameters determination by optimizing the stochastic model using variance component estimation (VCE). We perform weekly estimates of the geodetic parameters, including station coordinates, Earth rotation parameters, and geocenter coordinates (GCC), using three years of SLR observations to seven LEO satellites at different orbits. The satellite-dependent, station-dependent, and satellite–station-dependent variance components are separately estimated through VCE processing to refine the stochastic models. Given the fact that the precision of SLR observations significantly differs in satellites and stations, the multiple LEO combination can be significantly improved with the implementation of VCE. Satellite–station-pair-dependent variance components are more suitable to the SLR VCE and the accuracy of station coordinates, pole coordinates, and length of day can be averagely improved by 8.4, 22.6, and 21.9%, respectively, compared to the equal-weight solution. Our result also indicates that the observation insufficiency for some stations may result in an unreliable VCE estimation, and eventually leads to an accuracy degradation for station coordinates. To overcome this deficiency, we adopt the variance components derived from the monthly solutions to build the stochastic model in the weekly solutions. The application of monthly weights can effectively mitigate the accuracy deterioration of station coordinates, improving the repeatability of the station coordinates by 15.9, 14.6, and 9.2% with respect to the equal-weight solution in E, N, and U components. The global geodetic parameters also benefit from this processing. The import of monthly weight decreases the outliers in the GCC series, especially in the X and Y components. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this contribution, we focus on the precise orbit determination (POD) for BDS3 experimental satellites with the international GNSS Monitoring and Assessment System (iGMAS) and Multi-GNSS Experiment (MGEX) tracking networks. The datasets of DOY (day of year) 001-230 in 2017 are analyzed with different processing strategies. By comparing receiver clock biases and receiver B1I-B3I DCBs, it is confirmed that there is no obvious systematic bias between experimental BDS3 and BDS2 in the common B1I and B3I signals, which indicates that experimental BDS3 and BDS2 can be treated as one system when performing combined POD. With iGMAS-only BDS3 stations, the 24-h overlap RMS of BDS3+BDS2+GPS combined POD is 24.3, 16.1 and 8.4 cm in along-track, cross-track and radial components, which is better than BDS3-only POD by 80-90% and better than BDS3+BDS2 combined POD by about 10%. With more stations (totally 20 stations from both iGMAS and MGEX) and the proper ambiguity resolution strategy (GEO ambiguities are float and BDS3 ambiguities are fixed), the performance of BDS3 POD can be further improved to 14.6, 7.9 and 3.7 cm, respectively, in along-track, cross-track and radial components, which is comparable to the performance of BDS2 POD. The 230-day SLR validations of C32, C33 and C34 show that the mean differences of -3.48, 7.81 and 8.19 cm can be achieved, while the STD is 13.35, 13.46 and 13.11 cm, respectively. Furthermore, the 230-day overlap comparisons reveal that C31 most likely still uses an orbit-normal mode and exhibits similar orbit modeling problems in orbit-normal periods as found in most of the BDS2 satellites. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]