Popis: |
Satellite-to-satellite tracking (SST) and satellite gravity gradiometry (SGG), respectively, are two measurement principles in modern satellite geodesy which yield knowledge of the first and second order radial derivative of the earth's gravitational potential at satellite altitude, respectively. A numerical method to compute the gravitational potential on the earth's surface from those observations should be capable of processing huge amounts of observational data. Moreover, it should yield a reconstruction of the gravitational potential at different levels of detail, and it should be possible to reconstruct the gravitational potential from only locally given data. SST and SGG are modeled as ill-posed linear pseudodifferential operator equations with an injective but non-surjective compact operator, which operates between Sobolev spaces of harmonic functions and such ones consisting of their first and second order radial derivatives, respectively. An immediate discretization of the operator equation is obtained by replacing the signal on its right-hand-side either by an interpolating or a smoothing spline which approximates the observational data. Here the noise level and the spatial distribution of the data determine whether spline-interpolation or spline-smoothing is appropriate. The large full linear equation system with positive definite matrix which occurs in the spline-interplation and spline-smoothing problem, respectively, is efficiently solved with the help of the Schwarz alternating algorithm, a domain decomposition method which allows it to split the large linear equation system into several smaller ones which are then solved alernatingly in an iterative procedure. Strongly space-localizing regularization scaling functions and wavelets are used to obtain a multiscale reconstruction of the gravitational potential on the earth's surface. In a numerical experiment the advocated method is successfully applied to reconstruct the earth's gravitational potential from simulated 'exact' and 'error-affected' SGG data on a spherical orbit, using Tikhonov regularization. The applicability of the numerical method is, however, not restricted to data given on a closed orbit but it can also cope with realistic satellite data. |