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Fast determination of satellite visibility with respect to a target area is important for satellite navigation and positioning. In this paper, we propose an adaptive interpolation algorithm based on vertex protection to solve the satellite visibility period problem more accurately and quickly, where "vertex" refers to the local extremum point. The algorithm can avoid the error in the visibility period calculation caused by skimming the vertices when fitting the multi-hump visibility function under certain fitting accuracy requirements with the traditional adaptive interpolation method. The algorithm does not need to construct a cubic polynomial in each subinterval to determine whether the satellite is visible or not; it only constructs a cubic polynomial to solve the problem if the visibility function of that subinterval is judged to have a solution from the existence theorem of zero points, which can improve the computational efficiency. For the lunar navigation problem, a solution to satellite-Moon visibility calculations based on a vertex-protected adaptive interpolation is given, and the experimental results show that the computation time of the algorithm can be reduced by approximately 98% compared with the brute force method and by approximately 30% compared with the traditional adaptive interpolation algorithm.

A quality evaluation of precise products for BDS-3 constellations is presented for the first time in this contribution. Then, the tropospheric delay retrieval and positioning performance of BDS-3 precise point positioning (PPP) solutions using the precise products (gbm, wum, iac, sha, cnt) with observations from 24 stations from DOY 280 to 317 in 2020 was comprehensively investigated. The orbit comparisons present consistencies of 0.09-0.22 m for the C19-C37 satellites and of 0.5-1.2 m for the C38-C46 satellites among the final products. The standard deviation (STD) values of the clock differences of iac showed the best agreement with those of gbm, followed by wum, sha. The clock differences performance of cnt was the worst. For BDS-3 PPP solutions with five Analysis centers (ACs) products, the median convergence times of static PPP mode incorporating the gbm, wum, iac, sha, and cnt products were 31.0, 33.5, 34.5, 37.8, and 72.0 min, respectively; the median convergence times of kinematic PPP model incorporating the same products were 40.5, 41.0, 50.5, 55.0, and 94.0 min, respectively. The positioning accuracies in the static and kinematic modes were approximately 1-4 cm, 2-6 cm in the horizontal and vertical components, respectively. With the final products in kinematic mode, the performance of PPP with real-time products (cnt) is poorer than all PPP with final products. The median of ZTD accuracies of the five products gbm, wum, iac, sha, and cnt were 7.84, 7.58, 7.04, 7.19, and 10.1 mm, respectively, and the accuracy differences were very small among five AC products (gbm, wum, iac, sha).