Relativistic Positioning System in Perturbed Space-time

Abstract

We present a variant of a Global Navigation Satellite System called a Relativistic Positioning System (RPS), which is based on emission coordinates. We modelled the RPS dynamics in a space-time around Earth, described by a perturbed Schwarzschild metric, where we included the perturbations due to Earth multipoles (up to the 6th), the Moon, the Sun, Venus, Jupiter, solid tide, ocean tide, and Kerr rotation effect. The exchange of signals between the satellites and a user was calculated using a ray-tracing method in the Schwarzschild space-time. We find that positioning in a perturbed space-time is feasible and is highly accurate already with standard numerical procedures: the positioning algorithms used to transform between the emission and the Schwarzschild coordinates of the user are very accurate and time efficient -- on a laptop it takes 0.04 s to determine the user's spatial and time coordinates with a relative accuracy of $10^{-28}-10^{-26}$ and $10^{-32}-10^{-30}$, respectively.