Other
Scientific paper
Dec 2003
adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2003agufm.g41b0034r&link_type=abstract
American Geophysical Union, Fall Meeting 2003, abstract #G41B-0034
Other
1227 Planetary Geodesy And Gravity (5420, 5714, 6019), 1241 Satellite Orbits, 1243 Space Geodetic Surveys, 1294 Instruments And Techniques, 5494 Instruments And Techniques
Scientific paper
We performed more than 30 VLBI experiments for the NOZOMI spacecraft navigation from September 2002 until July 2003. NOZOMI, which means ``Hope'' in Japanese, is the Japan's first Mars probe developed and launched by the Institute of Space and Astronautical Science (ISAS). NOZOMI was originally scheduled to reach its destination in October 1999. However, NOZOMI had to be forced to make extra maneuver due to malfunction of a thruster valve during the powered earth swing-by. As a result, it was found that NOZOMI no longer had enough fuel to inject itself into its scheduled orbit on arrival at Mars. Fortunately, the ISAS mission analysis team succeeded to reschedule its flight plan to meet both fuel and observation conditions. According to the new trajectory strategy, NOZOMI's arrival at Mars is scheduled in the middle of December 2003 through two additional earth swingbys in December 2002 and June 2003.
Our main concern was to determine the NOZOMI orbit just before the second earth swingby on June 19, 2003. It was significantly important to get the timing to maneuver the NOZOMI before the swingby. ISAS scientists were afraid that the range and range rate (R&RR) orbit determination might not be available because it was difficult to point the high-gain antenna mounted the spacecraft toward the earth during the period between two swingby events. So we started to support the orbit determination of the NOZOMI using differential VLBI technique since September 2002. These VLBI experiments are also aimed to establish the positioning technology for the interplanetary spacecrafts in realtime.
We use nine VLBI antennas in Japan to carry out the VLBI experiments at X-band. Algonquin 46-m of the Space Geodynamics Laboratory (SGL) of CRESTech also participated in the several experiments. We equipped the state of the art ``K5 VLBI system'' to these stations. The K5 system is the multiple PC-based VLBI system equipped with a specific PCI-bus board on the FreeBSD and Linux operating system. The K5 system includes the original software packages which are data sampling and acquisition, real-time IP data transmission, and correlation analysis. For the purpose of analyzing the VLBI observables we are developing the specific VLBI delay model for finite distance radio source. The model is already implemented in the VLBI software package. The package will include the VLBI observation scheduling to take account of the passage of the spacecraft near the quasar line of sight and the propagation delay estimating for the ionosphere and the neutral atmosphere.
We can successfully detect fringes of NOZOMI range signal for several baselines using software correlation in spite of weak and narrow-bandwidth signal. We provided 15 VLBI group delay data sets to ISAS to support the orbit determination at the end of May 2003. On the other hand, ISAS scientists have fortunately succeeded to determine the NOZOMI orbit using R&RR observables at the end of May 2003. Preliminary results demonstrate that the VLBI delay residuals are consistent with R&RR observables. However, the rms scatter between them are relatively large up to several tens nanoseconds. We are now evaluating our VLBI data sets by comparing with the R&RR results.
Hiroo O.
Makoto Y.
Mamoru S.
Nozomi Dvlbi Group,.
Ryuichi Ichikawa
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