Daniele Serra

The Mercury Orbiter Radio Science Experiment (MORE) of the ESA mission BepiColombo will provide an accurate estimation of Mercury’s gravity field and rotational state, improved tests of general relativity, and a novel deep space navigation system. The key experimental setup entails a highly stable, multi-frequency radio link in X and Ka band, enabling two-way range rate measurements of 3 micron/s at nearly all solar elongation angles. In addition, a high chip rate, pseudo-noise ranging system has already been tested at 1-2 cm accuracy. The tracking data will be used together with the measurements of the Italian Spring Accelerometer to provide a pseudo drag free environment for the data analysis. We summarize the existing literature published over the past years and report on the overall configuration of the experiment, its operations in cruise and at Mercury, and the expected scientific results.

The Juno spacecraft arrived at Jupiter’s system on July 4th, 2016 and reached the mid-point of its nominal mission in December 2018, after completing 17 perijove passes. Juno is currently orbiting Jupiter in a highly eccentric orbit, with a perijove altitude of about 4000 km that provides great sensitivity to the gravitational field of the planet. The radioscience instrumentation on board Juno enables very accurate radial velocity (Doppler) measurements, with noise as low as 10 micron/s at an integration time of 60 s. The gravity field of the planet is recovered though detailed reconstruction of Juno’s motion and observation model, performed with JPL’s and University of Pisa’s latest precise orbit determination codes, MONTE and ORBIT14 respectively.We provide an update on Jupiter’s gravity field, its tidal response and spin axis motion over the first half of Juno’s mission. Although the Doppler data collected during the first two gravity-dedicated perijove passes have been reduced to the noise level by assuming a purely axially symmetric field for the gas giant, the current dataset, which includes ten passes, hints to a non-static and/or non-axially symmetric field, possibly related to several different mechanisms, such as normal modes, localized atmospheric or deeply-rooted dynamics.

The latest estimation of Jupiter’s gravitational field was obtained by processing the Doppler data from two gravity orbits of NASA’s Juno mission, using the Jet Propulsion Laboratory software monte. In this work, we present the results of the analysis of the same measurements employing the orbit determination software orbit14, developed at the University of Pisa, used here for the first time with real data. We found that the estimated values of Jupiter’s spherical harmonic coefficients from the two solutions are consistent within the formal uncertainty. The analysis is complemented with a discussion on the results obtained with alternative set-ups.

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.

The combination of the Doppler data from the first two Juno science orbits provides an improved estimate of the gravity field of Jupiter, crucial for interior modeling of giant planets. The low‐degree spherical harmonic coefficients, especially J₄ and J₆, are determined with accuracies better than previously published by a factor of 5 or more. In addition, the independent estimates of the Jovian gravity field, obtained by the orbits separately, agree within uncertainties, pointing to a good stability of the solution. The degree 2 sectoral and tesseral coefficients, C_2,1, S_2,1, C_2,2, and S_2,2, were determined to be statistically zero as expected for a fluid planet in equilibrium.