The aim of this paper is to present the concept of a dedicated gravity field mission for the planet Mars, the Mars Quantum Gravity Mission (MaQuIs). The mission is targeted at improving the data on the gravitational field of Mars, enabling studies on planetary dynamics, seasonal changes, and subsurface water reservoirs. MaQuIs follows well known mission scenarios, currently deployed for Earth, and includes state-of-the-art quantum technologies to enhance the gained scientific signal.

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We investigate the impact of viscoelastic tidal deformation of the Moon on the motion of a polar orbiter. The dissipative effects in the Moon’s interior, i.e., tidal phase lags, are modeled as Fourier series sampled at given frequencies associated with linear combinations of Delaunay arguments, the fundamental parameters describing the lunar motion around the Earth and the Sun. We implement the tidal model to evaluate the temporal lunar gravity field and the induced perturbation on the orbiter. We validate the numerical scheme via a frequency analysis of the perturbed orbital motion. We show that, in the case of the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter at a low altitude of less than 200 km, the main lunar tides and hence the potential Love numbers around the monthly and some multiple frequencies are dynamically separable. The omission of those effects in practice introduces a position error at the level of a few decimeters within 10 days.

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This work evaluates the added benefit of using laser altimeter measurements for orbit reconstruction. As a spacecraft orbits a celestial body, its altimetry swaths progressively cross previous swaths. These locations, known as crossover points, yield valuable information about the orbited body and the spacecraft trajectory. The mathematical expressions for the inclusion of crossover measurements into orbit determination algorithms are presented and evaluated. It is shown that a first-order approximation of these expressions is insufficient and a more detailed expression is developed. To evaluate the impact of altimetry crossover measurements on orbit determination, the planetary mission Jupiter Icy moons Explorer (JUICE) by the European Space Agency (ESA) is used as a case study by means of a covariance analysis. In this initial analysis, the assumption is made that all altimetry measurements are obtained with nadir pointing which limits the direct applicability of our method until pointing is accounted for.

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The JUpiter Icy moons Explorer (JUICE) will investigate Ganymede's and Callisto's surfaces and subsurfaces from orbit to explore the geologic processes that have shaped and altered their surfaces by impact, tectonics, possible cryovolcanism, space weathering due to micrometeorites, radiation and charged particles as well as explore the structure and properties of the icy crust and liquid shell (Grasset et al., 2013). The best possible synergy of the JUICE instruments is required to answer the major science objective of this mission and to fully exploit the potential of the JUICE mission. Therefore, the JUICE team is aiming to define high priority targets on both Ganymede's and Callisto's surfaces to support the coordination of the planning activities by the individual instrument teams. Based on the science objectives of the JUICE mission and the most recent knowledge of Ganymede's and Callisto's geologic evolution we propose a collection of Regions of Interest (RoIs), which characterize surface features and terrain types representing important traces of geologic processes, from past and/or present cryovolcanic and tectonic activity to space weathering processes, which are crucial to understand the geologic evolution of Ganymede and Callisto. The proposed evaluation of RoIs is based on their scientific importance as well as on the opportunities and conditions to observe them during the currently discussed mission profile.

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Jupiter’s moon Ganymede might be in possession of a subsurface ocean located between two ice layers. However, from Galileo data it is not possible to unambiguously infer the thickness and densities of the individual layers. The upcoming icy satellite mission JUICE (JUpiter ICy moons Explorer) will have the possibility to perform more detailed investigations of Ganymede’s interior structure with the radio science experiment 3GM and the GAnymede Laser Altimeter (GALA). Here we investigate the possibility to derive the rotational state of the outer ice shell by using topography measured by laser altimetry. We discuss two different methods to invert synthetic laser altimetry data. Method 1 is based on a spherical harmonics expansion and Method 2 solves for B-splines on a rectangular grid. While Method 1 has significant limitations due to the omission of high degrees of the global expansion, Method 2 leads to stable results allowing for an estimate of the in-orbit measurement accuracy. We estimate that GALA can measure the amplitude of Ganymede’s librations with an accuracy of 2.5–6.6 µrad (6.6–17.4 m at the equator). This allows for determining the thickness of an elastic ice shell, if decoupled from the deeper interior by a subsurface ocean, to about an accuracy of 24–65 km.

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We computed interior structure models of Mercury and analyzed their viscoelastic tidal response. The models are consistent with MErcury Surface, Space Environment, GEochemistry, and Ranging mission inferences of mean density, mean moment of inertia, moment of inertia of mantle and crust, and tidal Love number k₂. Based on these constraints we predict the tidal Love number h₂ to be in the range from 0.77 to 0.93. Using an Andrade rheology for the mantle the tidal phase-lag is predicted to be 4° at maximum. The corresponding tidal dissipation in Mercury's silicate mantle induces a surface heat flux smaller than 0.16 mW/m². We show that, independent of the adopted mantle rheological model, the ratio of the tidal Love numbers h₂ and k₂ provides a better constraint on the maximum inner core size with respect to other geodetic parameters (e.g., libration amplitude or a single Love number), provided it responds elastically to the solar tide. For inner cores larger than 700 km, and with the expected determination of h₂ from the upcoming BepiColombo mission, it may be possible to constrain the size of the inner core. The measurement of the tidal phase-lag with an accuracy better than ≈0.5° would further allow constraining the temperature at the core-mantle boundary for a given grain size and therefore improve our understanding of the physical structure of Mercury's core.

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We processed and analyzed one-way laser ranging data from International Laser Ranging Service ground stations to NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), obtained from June 13, 2009 until September 30, 2014. We pair and analyze the one-way range observables from station laser fire and spacecraft laser arrival times by using nominal LRO orbit models based on the GRAIL gravity field. We apply corrections for instrument range walk, as well as for atmospheric and relativistic effects. In total we derived a tracking data volume of ≈ 3000 hours featuring 64 million Full Rate and 1.5 million Normal Point observations. From a statistical analysis of the dataset we evaluate the experiment and the ground station performance. We observe a laser ranging measurement precision of 12.3 cm in case of the Full Rate data which surpasses the LOLA timestamp precision of 15 cm. The averaging to Normal Point data further reduces the measurement precision to 5.6 cm. We characterized the LRO clock with fits throughout the mission time and estimated the rate to 6.9 × 10⁻⁸, the aging to 1.6 × 10⁻¹²/day and the change of aging to 2.3 × 10⁻¹⁴ /day²over all mission phases. The fits also provide referencing of onboard time to the TDB time scale at a precision of 166 ns over two and 256 ns over all mission phases, representing ground to space time transfer. Furthermore we measure ground station clock differences from the fits as well as from simultaneous passes which we use for ground to ground time transfer from common view observations. We observed relative offsets ranging from 33 to 560 ns and relative rates ranging from 2 × 10⁻¹³ to 6 × 10⁻¹² between the ground station clocks during selected mission phases. We study the results from the different methods and discuss their applicability for time transfer.

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We used one-way laser ranging data from International Laser Ranging Service (ILRS) ground stations to NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) for a demonstration of orbit determination. In the one-way setup, the state of LRO and the parameters of the spacecraft and all involved ground station clocks must be estimated simultaneously. This setup introduces many correlated parameters that are resolved by using a priori constraints. Moreover the observation data coverage and errors accumulating from the dynamical and the clock modeling limit the maximum arc length. The objective of this paper is to investigate the effect of the arc length, the dynamical and modeling accuracy and the observation data coverage on the accuracy of the results. We analyzed multiple arcs using lengths of 2 and 7 days during a one-week period in Science Mission phase 02 (SM02, November 2010) and compared the trajectories, the post-fit measurement residuals and the estimated clock parameters. We further incorporated simultaneous passes from multiple stations within the observation data to investigate the expected improvement in positioning. The estimated trajectories were compared to the nominal LRO trajectory and the clock parameters (offset, rate and aging) to the results found in the literature. Arcs estimated with one-way ranging data had differences of 5–30 m compared to the nominal LRO trajectory. While the estimated LRO clock rates agreed closely with the a priori constraints, the aging parameters absorbed clock modeling errors with increasing clock arc length. Because of high correlations between the different ground station clocks and due to limited clock modeling accuracy, their differences only agreed at the order of magnitude with the literature. We found that the incorporation of simultaneous passes requires improved modeling in particular to enable the expected improvement in positioning. We found that gaps in the observation data coverage over 12 h (≈6 successive LRO orbits) prevented the successful estimation of arcs with lengths shorter or longer than 2 or 7 days with our given modeling.@en