Modelling the nongravitational acceleration during Cassini's gravitation experiments

Abstract

In this paper we present a computation of the thermally generated acceleration of the Cassini probe during its solar conjunction experiment, obtained from a model of the spacecraft. We build a thermal model of the vehicle and perform a Monte Carlo simulation to find a thermal acceleration with a main component of $(3.01\pm 0.33)\times 10^{-9}m/{\mathrm{s}}^2$. This result is in close agreement with the estimates of this effect performed through Doppler data analysis.

8 pages, 3 figures

References in corpus (3)

• Support for the thermal origin of the Pioneer anomaly
• Searching for modifications to the exponential radioactive decay law with the Cassini spacecraft
• Thermal Analysis of the Pioneer Anomaly: A method to estimate radiative momentum transfer