Related papers: Relativistic Warning to Space Missions Aimed to Re…
Recent investigations (e.g. Han et al. 2001) have shown that fitting the Hipparcos observations with an orbital model when the astrometric wobble caused by the companion is below the noise level can have rather unexpected consequences. With…
In this paper we address the following question: do the recent advances in the orbit determination of the major natural satellites of Saturn obtained with the analysis of the first data sets from the Cassini mission allow to detect the…
Close planetary flybys are frequently employed as a technique to place spacecraft on extreme solar system trajectories that would otherwise require much larger booster vehicles or may not even be feasible when relying solely on chemical…
We reexamine non-Einsteinian effects observable in the orbital motion of low-orbit artificial Earth satellites. The motivations for doing so are twofold: (i) recent theoretical studies suggest that the correct theory of gravity might…
In the last two decades an anomalous variation in the asymptotic velocity of spacecraft performing a flyby manoeuvre around Earth has been discovered through careful Doppler tracking and orbital analysis. No viable hypothesis for a…
The motion of a satellite can experience secular resonances between the precession frequencies of its orbit and the mean motion of the host planet around the star. Some of these resonances can significantly modify the eccentricity (evection…
The two moons of Mars, Phobos and Deimos, have orbits that are close to martian equator, indicating their formation from a circumplanetary disk. Phobos is currently migrating toward Mars due to tidal dissipation within the planet, and may…
In this brief note some comments about the observable used in a recently published paper on the measurement of the general relativistic Lense-Thirring in the gravitational field of the Earth are presented. It turns out that, among other…
High-precision ephemerides are not only useful in supporting space missions, but also in investigating the physical nature of celestial bodies. This paper reports an update to the orbit and rotation model of the Martian moon Phobos. In…
In this paper we will show in detail that the performed attempts aimed at the detection of the general relativistic Lense-Thirring effect in the gravitational field of the Earth with the existing LAGEOS satellites are often presented in an…
In the context of relativistic positioning, the coordinates of a given user may be calculated by using suitable information broadcast by a 4-tuple of satellites. Our 4-tuples belong to the Galileo constellation. Recently, we estimated the…
Relativistic rotation is considered in the limit of angular velocity approaching zero and radial distance approaching infinity, such that centrifugal acceleration is immeasurably small while tangent velocity remains close to the speed of…
Satellite conjunctions involving "near misses" of space objects are becoming increasingly likely. One approach to risk analysis for them involves the computation of the collision probability, but this has been regarded as having some…
We show here that the recent claim of a test of the Lense-Thirring effect with an error of 0.5% using the Mars Global Surveyor is misleading and the quoted error is incorrect by a factor of at least ten thousand. Indeed, the simple error…
Timing and phase resolution in satellite QKD, kilometre-scale gravitational-wave detectors, and space-borne clock networks hinge on quantum-speed limits (QSLs), yet benchmarks omit relativistic effects for coherent and squeezed probes. We…
We consider a nearly free falling Earth satellite where atomic wave interferometers are tied to a telescope pointing towards a faraway star. They measure the acceleration and the rotation relatively to the local inertial frame. We calculate…
Corrections to the relativistic orbits are studied considering higher order approximations induced by gravitomagnetic effects. We discuss in details how such corrections come out taking into account magnetic components in the weak field…
We study the effect of retardation of gravity in binary pulsars. It appears in pulsar timing formula as a periodic excess time delay to the Shapiro effect. The retardation of gravity effect can be large enough for observation in binary…
The flyby anomaly is a persistent riddle in astrodynamics. Orbital analysis in several flybys of the Earth since the Galileo spacecraft flyby of the Earth in 1990 have shown that the asymptotic post-encounter velocity exhibits a difference…
All anomalous velocity increases until now observed during the Earth flybys of the spacecrafts Galileo, NEAR, Rosetta, Cassini and Messenger have been correctly calculated by computer simulation using an asymmetric field term in addition to…