Recovery of the Earth's gravity field from formation-flying satellites: Temporal aliasing issues

As expected, the gravity field products derived from future SFF configurations may surpass those obtained from GRACE in terms of isotropy of the gravity field. Our study provides detailed results for many scenarios ranging in terms of spherical harmonic truncation to up to 100 for mean and temporal solutions. Furthermore, we show that specific SFF configurations involving radial and cross-track information strengthen the recovery of the gravitational signal; in addition they are able to significantly reduce the aliasing errors appearing in the temporal GRACE gravity field monthly solutions. Following this, we suggest to fly a future mission in pendulum configuration.