Related papers: Light-time computations for the BepiColombo radios…
The Mercury Orbiter radio Science Experiment (MORE) is one of the experiments on-board the ESA/JAXA BepiColombo mission to Mercury, to be launched in October 2018. Thanks to full on-board and on-ground instrumentation performing very…
The Mercury Orbiter radio Science Experiment (MORE) is one of the experiments on-board the ESA/JAXA BepiColombo mission to Mercury, to be launched in October 2018. Thanks to full on-board and on-ground instrumentation performing very…
BepiColombo ESA/JAXA mission is currently in its 7 year cruise phase towards Mercury. The Mercury orbiter radioscience experiment (MORE), one of the 16 experiments of the mission, will start its scientific investigation during the superior…
A major goal of the BepiColombo mission to Mercury is the determination of the structure and state of Mercury's interior. Here the BepiColombo rotation experiment has been simulated in order to assess the ability to attain the mission goals…
The ESA-JAXA BepiColombo mission will provide simultaneous measurements from two spacecraft, offering an unprecedented opportunity to investigate magnetospheric and exospheric dynamics at Mercury as well as their interactions with the solar…
The ESA/JAXA BepiColombo mission, launched on 20 October 2018, is currently in cruise toward Mercury. The Mercury Orbiter Radio-science Experiment (MORE), one of the 16 experiments of the mission, will exploit range and range-rate…
BepiColombo is a joint ESA/JAXA mission to Mercury with challenging objectives regarding geophysics, geodesy and fundamental physics. The Mercury Orbiter Radioscience Experiment (MORE) is one of the on-board experiments, including three…
Mercury is the target of two space missions: MESSENGER (NASA) which orbit insertion is planned for March 2011, and ESA/JAXA BepiColombo, that should be launched in 2014. Their instruments will observe the surface of the planet with a high…
The purpose of this work is the analysis of the consequences that desaturation maneuvers can have in the precise orbit determination corresponding to the Radio Science Experiment (MORE) of the BepiColombo mission to Mercury. This mission is…
We point out the existence of a new general relativistic contribution to the perihelion advance of Mercury that, while smaller than the contributions arising from the solar quadrupole moment and angular momentum, is 100 times larger than…
The 3:2 spin-orbit resonance between the rotational and orbital motions of Mercury results from a functional dependance on a tidal friction adding to a non-zero eccentricity with a permanent asymmetry in the equatorial plane of the planet.…
We review the results from {\it Mariner 10} regarding Mercury's gravity field and the results from radar ranging regarding topography. We discuss the implications of improving these results, including a determination of the polar component,…
In the last years, a new generation of interplanetary space missions have been designed for the exploration of the solar system. At the same time, radio-science instrumentation has reached an unprecedented level of accuracy, leading to a…
The possibility of measuring the post-Newtonian gravitoelectric correction to the orbital period of a test particle freely orbiting a spherically symmetric mass in the Solar System is analyzed. It should be possible, in principle, to detect…
The European Space Agency's BepiColombo mission continues its pioneering voyage to Mercury, the innermost planet of the Solar System. Among the advanced instruments onboard the Mercury Planetary Orbiter (MPO) is the Italian Spring…
The increasing precision of spacecraft radiometric tracking data experienced in the last number of years, coupled with the huge amount of data collected and the long baselines of the available datasets, has made the direct observation of…
Due to its relatively large eccentricity and proximity to the Sun, Mercury's orbital motion provides one of the best solar-system tests of relativistic gravity. We emphasize the number of feasible relativistic gravity tests that can be…
We address the question of to what accuracy remote sensing images of the surface of planets can be matched, so that the possible displacement of features on the surface can be accurately measured. This is relevant in the context of the…
Today, the motion of spacecraft is still described by the classical Newtonian equations of motion plus some relativistic corrections. This approach might become cumbersome due to the increasing precision required. We use the Relativistic…
Here we explore a novel approach in order to try to measure the post-Newtonian 1/c^2 Lense-Thirring secular effect induced by the gravitomagnetic field of the Sun on the planetary orbital motion. Due to the relative smallness of the solar…