Related papers: Orbit determination methods for interplanetary mis…
Juno is a NASA mission launched in 2011 with the goal of studying Jupiter. The probe will arrive to the planet in 2016 and will be placed for one year in a polar high-eccentric orbit to study the composition of the planet, the gravity and…
The radioscience experiment is one of the on board experiment of the Mercury ESA mission BepiColombo that will be launched in 2014. The goals of the experiment are to determine the gravity field of Mercury and its rotation state, to…
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 core of every orbit determination process is the comparison between the measured observables and their predicted values, computed using the adopted mathematical models, and the minimization, in a least square sense, of their…
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…
Independently developed orbit determination software is used to analyze the orbits of Pioneer 10 and 11 using Doppler data. The analysis takes into account the gravitational fields of the Sun and planets using the latest JPL ephemerides,…
Planetary science space missions need high quality software ed efficient algorithms in order to extract innovative scientific results from flight data. Reliable and efficient software technologies are increasingly vital to improve and…
Most methods of orbit determination are often difficult for numerical implementations since they are developed before the computer era. The recently developed mathematical technique of semi-definite programming (SDP) has been implemented…
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…
The accuracy of orbit determination has a strong impact on the scientific output of the Space VLBI mission RadioAstron. The aim of this work is to improve the RadioAstron orbit reconstruction by means of sophisticated dynamical modelling of…
We present a procedure for determination of positions and orbital elements, and associated uncertainties, of outer Solar System planets. The orbit-fitting procedure is greatly streamlined compared to traditional methods because acceleration…
This paper presents an algorithm for the preprocessing of observation data aimed at improving the robustness of orbit determination tools. Two objectives are fulfilled: obtain a refined solution to the initial orbit determination problem…
Stellar occultations currently provide the most accurate ground-based measurements of the positions of natural satellites (down to a few kilometres for the Galilean moons). However, when using these observations in the calculation of…
An innovative orbit determination method which makes use of gravity gradients for Low-Earth-Orbiting satellites is proposed. The measurement principle of gravity gradiometry is briefly reviewed and the sources of measurement error are…
In this article, theory-based analytical methodologies of astrophysics employed in the modern era are suitably operated alongside a test research-grade telescope to image and determine the orbit of a near-earth asteroid from original…
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…
We present an overview of the operations and engineering interface for Planetary Radio Interferometry and Doppler Experiment (PRIDE) radio astronomy observations as a scientific component of the ESA s Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer (JUICE)…
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…
This paper presents a novel formulation and solution of orbit determination over finite time horizons as a learning problem. We present an approach to orbit determination under very broad conditions that are satisfied for n-body problems.…
The planetary ephemerides play a crucial role for spacecraft navigation, mission planning, reduction and analysis of the most precise astronomical observations. The construction of such ephemerides is highly constrained by the tracking…