Ionospheric refraction is a dominant source of error in satellite observations from the Naval Space Surveillance system. Due to the very large number of observations per day needing real-time correction (175,000), a highly efficient refraction correction is required. A low-cost concept for real-time calibration of ionospheric refraction error is introduced in this paper. For this application, refraction is computed by a simplified ray bending formula using the electron content from an analytical ionospheric model. The precision of the simplified ray-bending model is assessed against numerical integration of the total path through an analytical model of the ionosphere. The error uncertainty associated with using an analytical refraction model is also estimated.
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