0000000000905048
AUTHOR
Giulia Schettino
The BepiColombo MORE gravimetry and rotation experiments with the ORBIT14 software
The BepiColombo mission to Mercury is an ESA/JAXA cornerstone mission, consisting of two spacecraft in orbit around Mercury addressing several scientific issues. One spacecraft is the Mercury Planetary Orbiter, with full instrumentation to perform radio science experiments. Very precise radio tracking from Earth, on-board accelerometer and optical measurements will provide large data sets. From these it will be possible to study the global gravity field of Mercury and its tidal variations, its rotation state and the orbit of its centre of mass. With the gravity field and rotation state, it is possible to constrain the internal structure of the planet. With the orbit of Mercury, it is possib…
The relativity experiment of MORE: Global full-cycle simulation and results
BepiColombo is a joint ESA/JAXA mission to Mercury with challenging objectives regarding geophysics, geodesy and fundamental physics. In particular, the Mercury Orbiter Radio science Experiment (MORE) intends, as one of its goals, to perform a test of General Relativity. This can be done by measuring and constraining the parametrized post-Newtonian (PPN) parameters to an accuracy significantly better than current one. In this work we perform a global numerical full-cycle simulation of the BepiColombo Radio Science Experiments (RSE) in a realistic scenario, focussing on the relativity experiment, solving simultaneously for all the parameters of interest for RSE in a global least squares fit …