Abstract:

A wide range of temporal and spatial relativistic transformation induces clock measurement error in the satellite’s clock synchronizing of deep space exploration. The components and magnitudes of various relativistic effects of space-borne clocks on common Earth-orbiting satellites and interplanetary probes are derived. It is confirmed useful to eliminate secular relativistic effects by clock frequency adjusting, and reduce periodic relativistic effects by realtime compensating. An interval frequency adjustment with error-restrict and a leap seconds method are adopted to restrict secular relativistic effect errors when the clocks lack frequency resolution. A cross correlation function is used to evaluate periodic errors when it is impossible to get the real-time position and velocity. The simulations show that the proposed error eliminating methods are effective， which could be used to provide solutions to improve clock synchronization of Mars exploration.