Light-time computations for the BepiColombo radioscience experiment

Abstract

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 determine the orbit of Mercury, to constrain the possible theories of gravitation (for example by determining the post-Newtonian (PN) parameters), to provide the spacecraft position for geodesy experiments and to contribute to planetary ephemerides improvement. This is possible thanks to a new technology which allows to reach great accuracies in the observables range and range rate; it is well known that a similar level of accuracy requires studying a suitable model taking into account numerous relativistic effects. In this paper we deal with the modelling of the space-time coordinate transformations needed for the light-time computations and the numerical methods adopted to avoid rounding-off errors in such computations.

14 pages, 7 figures, corrected references

References in corpus (1)

• General post-Minkowskian expansion of time transfer functions

Cited by in corpus (9)

• Relativistic formulation of coordinate light time, Doppler and astrometric observables up to the second post-Minkowskian order
• General relativistic observables of the GRAIL mission
• Desaturation Maneuvers and Precise Orbit Determination for the BepiColombo Mission
• On the Juno Radio Science Experiment: models, algorithms and sensitivity analysis
• Constraining the Nordtvedt parameter with the BepiColombo Radioscience experiment
• Comparison of light-time formulations in the post-Newtonian framework for the BepiColombo MORE experiment
• Addressing some critical aspects of the BepiColombo MORE relativity experiment
• Orbit determination methods for interplanetary missions: development and use of the Orbit14 software
• On the efficient computation of the quadrupole light deflection