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Addressing some critical aspects of the BepiColombo MORE relativity experiment

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Abstract

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 precise tracking from the Earth, MORE will have the chance to determine with very high accuracy the Mercury-centric orbit of the spacecraft and the heliocentric orbit of Mercury. This will allow to undertake an accurate test of relativistic theories of gravitation (relativity experiment), which consists in improving the knowledge of some post-Newtonian and related parameters, whose value is predicted by General Relativity. This paper focuses on two critical aspects of the BepiColombo relativity experiment. First of all, we address the delicate issue of determining the orbits of Mercury and the Earth–Moon barycenter at the level of accuracy required by the purposes of the experiment and we discuss a strategy to cure the rank deficiencies that appear in the problem. Secondly, we introduce and discuss the role of the Solar Lense–Thirring effect in the Mercury orbit determination problem and in the relativistic parameters estimation.

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Notes

  1. The strategy adopted in our orbit determination code is to determine the EMB orbit instead of the Earth orbit.

  2. There are accurate definitions of the time scales based upon atomic clocks.

  3. Under an Italian Space Agency commission.

  4. Two additional parameters to estimate a possible bias and rate over time in the range observations can be added to the solve-for list to avoid biasing in the solution due to systematic errors in ranging.

  5. Strategy I has been adopted until now for the MORE relativity experiment.

  6. For the definition of observed arc see, e.g., Cicalò (2016).

  7. The nominal value of \(J_{2\odot }\) in simulation has been set to \(2.0\times 10^{-7}\).

  8. From helioseismology, the angular momentum of the Sun can be constrained significantly better than the 10% level (see, e.g., Pijpers 1998), thus our assumption is fully acceptable and is consistent with what done in Park (2017).

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Acknowledgements

The results of the research presented in this paper have been performed within the scope of the Addendum No. I/080/09/1 of the Contract No. I/080/09/0 with the Italian Space Agency. The authors would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for the valuable comments and the significant improvements to the earlier version of the manuscript.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. IFAC-CNR, Via Madonna del Piano 10, 50019, Sesto Fiorentino (FI), Italy

    Giulia Schettino

  2. Dipartimento di Matematica, Università di Pisa, Largo B. Pontecorvo 5, 56127, Pisa, Italy

    Giulia Schettino, Daniele Serra, Giacomo Tommei & Andrea Milani

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  1. Giulia Schettino
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  2. Daniele Serra
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  3. Giacomo Tommei
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Correspondence to Giulia Schettino.

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This article is part of the topical collection on Innovative methods for space threats: from their dynamics to interplanetary missions.

Guest Editors: Giovanni Federico Gronchi, Ugo Locatelli, Giuseppe Pucacco and Alessandra Celletti.

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Schettino, G., Serra, D., Tommei, G. et al. Addressing some critical aspects of the BepiColombo MORE relativity experiment. Celest Mech Dyn Astr 130, 72 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10569-018-9863-3

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