ISA - An Accelerometer to Detect the Disturbing Accelerations Acting on the Mercury Planetary Orbiter of the BepiColombo ESA Cornerstone Mission to Mercury: on Ground Calibration

Details ISA - An Accelerometer to Detect the Disturbing Accelerations Acting on the Mercury Planetary Orbiter of the BepiColombo ESA Cornerstone Mission to Mercury: on Ground Calibration ISA - An Accelerometer to Detect the Disturbing Accelerations Acting on the Mercury Planetary Orbiter of the BepiColombo ESA Cornerstone Mission to Mercury: on Ground Calibration

Jun 2006

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2006aipc..841..453i&link_type=abstract

A CENTURY OF RELATIVITY PHYSICS: ERE 2005; XXVIII Spanish Relativity Meeting. AIP Conference Proceedings, Volume 841, pp. 453-4

Physics

Experimental Tests Of Gravitational Theories, Spaceborne And Space Research Instruments, Apparatus, And Components, Mercury

Scientific paper

To reach the ambitious goals of the Radio Science Experiment of the BepiColombo space mission to Mercury, among which the planet structure and rotation and test Einstein's theory of General Relativity (GR) to an unprecedented accuracy, an accelerometer has been selected to fly on-board the MPO (Mercury Planetary Orbiter), the main spacecraft of the two to be placed around the innermost planet of our solar system around 2017. The key role of the on-board accelerometer is to remove from the list of unknowns the non-gravitational accelerations that disturbs the pure gravitational orbit of the MPO spacecraft in the strong radiation environment of Mercury. In this way the ``corrected'' orbit of the MPO may be regarded as a geodesic in the field of Mercury. Then, thanks to the very precise tracking from Earth, the possibility to study Mercury's center-of-mass around the Sun and estimate several parameters related to the planet structure and verify the theory of GR. The selected accelerometer named ISA (Italian Spring Accelerometer) is an high sensitive instrument with an intrinsic noise of 10-10 g⊕ / Hz (with g⊕ ≅ 9.8 m / s2) in the frequency band 3 . 10-5 -10-1 Hz. ISA is a three axis accelerometer with a characteristic configuration, in order to minimize the disturbing accelerations due to the gravity-gradients and the apparent forces on the Nadir pointing MPO spacecraft. Because of the complex and strong radiation environment of Mercury, the modelling of the non-gravitational acceleration is quite difficult, while, with the use of ISA accelerometer we are able to gain a factor 100 in accuracy. In this brief paper we will focus on the characteristics of the ISA accelerometer, on its positioning on-board the MPO and in particularly to the techniques for on ground calibration, avoiding the effects of the Earth gravity.

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