A Study on the formation of the gravitational Model based on Point-mass Method

The virtual point-mass method has been widely used in dealing with the approximation of the local gravity field which is a difficult problem in internal currently. In this paper, the approximation theory of point-mass model is briefly introduced, and the characteristics of the elements in the coefficient matrix for the model construction are analyzed by numerical calculation. The observations of gravity anomaly is simulated from EGM2008 with degree and order 720 and the approximated region is and . A four-tier point-mass model which is on the base of the geopotential model with degree and order 36 from low frequency to high frequency is applied to approximate the local earth’s gravity field. The results of the experiments show that the truncation error of gravity disturbance created by using the point-mass model is less than 2 mGal on the radial direction and there is an optimal truncation error for some certain spectrum gravity field in the space.