Related papers: Low-Earth Orbit Determination from Gravity Gradien…
Spaceborne gravity gradients are proposed in this paper to provide autonomous orbit determination capabilities for near Earth satellites. The gravity gradients contain useful position information which can be extracted by matching the…
Autonomous orbit determination via integration of epoch-differenced gravity gradients and starlight refraction is proposed in this paper for low-Earth-orbiting satellites operating in GPS-denied environments. The starlight refrac-tion can…
Given the critical roles that satellites play in national defense, public safety, and worldwide communications, finding ways to determine satellite trajectories is a crucially important task for improved space situational awareness.…
In this Note, a new approach to spacecraft positioning based on GGT inversion is presented. The gravity gradient tensor is initially measured in the gradiometer reference frame (GRF) and then transformed to the Earth-Centered Earth-Fixed…
We propose a concept for future space gravity missions using cold atom interferometers for measuring the diagonal elements of the gravity gradient tensor and the spacecraft angular velocity. The aim is to achieve better performance than…
Low Earth orbit (LEO) satellites offer a promising alternative to global navigation satellite systems for precise positioning; however, their relatively low altitudes make them more susceptible to orbital perturbations, which in turn…
Orbit determination of spacecraft in orbit has been mostly dependent on either GNSS satellite signals or ground station telemetry. Both methods present their limitations, however: GNSS signals can only be used effectively in earth orbit,…
In this paper we examine the possibility of testing the equivalence principle, in its weak form, by analyzing the orbital motion of a pair of artificial satellites of different composition moving along orbits of identical shape and size in…
The time-wise and space-wise approaches are generally applied to data processing and error analysis for satellite gravimetry missions. But both the approaches, which are based on least-squares collocation, address the whole effect of…
Due to the importance of satellites for society and the exponential increase in the number of objects in orbit, it is important to accurately determine the state (e.g., position and velocity) of these Resident Space Objects (RSOs) at any…
We propose a method to account for the Earth oblateness effect in preliminary orbit determination of satellites in low orbits with radar observations. This method is an improvement of the one described in (Gronchi et al 2015), which uses a…
The traditional way of estimating the gravitational field from observed motions of test objects is based on the virial relation between their kinetic and potential energy. We find a more efficient method. It is based on the natural…
This paper presents an integrated model-learning predictive control scheme for spacecraft orbit-attitude station-keeping in the vicinity of asteroids. The orbiting probe relies on optical and laser navigation while attitude measurements are…
In this contribution we present two new proposals for measuring the general relativistic gravitomagnetic component of the gravitational field of the Earth. One proposal consists of the measurement of the difference of the rates of the…
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…
We present an approach to testing the gravitational redshift effect using the RadioAstron satellite. The experiment is based on a modification of the Gravity Probe A scheme of nonrelativistic Doppler compensation and benefits from the…
The emergence of quantum technologies, including cold atom based accelerometers, offers an opportunity to improve the performances of space geodesy missions. In this context, CNES initiated an assessment study called GRICE (GRadiom\'etrie…
The trajectory of an interplanetary spacecraft can be used to test gravitation in the Solar System. Its determination relies on radio tracking and is limited by the uncertainty on the spacecraft non-gravitational acceleration. The addition…
We report on a new test of the gravitational redshift and thus of local position invariance, an integral part of the Einstein equivalence principle, which is the foundation of general relativity and all metric theories of gravitation. We…
This paper discusses a novel approach for detecting moving massive objects based on the time variation that these objects produce in the local gravitational field measured by several detectors. Such an approach may provide a viable method…