Citation
Abstract
The BepiColombo mission to Mercury desires more accurate radio metric ranging measurements to study relativistic effects on the planet’s orbit around the Sun. Ranging measurements as accurate as 10 cm have been proposed for this purpose and will require improvements in spacecraft hardware and calibration of effects from the transmission media. But there are also improvements needed to the Deep Space Network (DSN) ranging system to achieve this goal. Delay through the equipment must be either controlled or calibrated beyond the current 2-m requirement. In 2009, a series of tests was performed to characterize the stability of range delay through the DSN uplink and downlink equipment. It was shown that stability is not consistent with the higher accuracy and that a more advanced calibration technique is needed.
Keywords
Details
- Volume
- 42-182
- Published
- August 15, 2010
- Pages
- 1–15
- File Size
- 3.1 MB