ISA, a High Sensitivity Accelerometer in the Interplanetary Space
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ISA, a High Sensitivity Accelerometer in the Interplanetary Space Updates after the Near-Earth Commissioning Phase of Italian Spring Accelerometer – ISA Francesco Santoli1 · Emiliano Fiorenza1 · Carlo Lefevre1 · David Massimo Lucchesi1 · Marco Lucente1 · Carmelo Magnafico1 · Alfredo Morbidini1 · Roberto Peron1 · Valerio Iafolla1 Received: 3 June 2020 / Accepted: 12 November 2020 © The Author(s) 2020
Abstract ISA (Italian Spring Accelerometer) is a high sensitivity accelerometer flying, as scientific payload, on-board one of the two spacecraft (the Mercury Planetary Orbiter) of BepiColombo, the first ESA mission to Mercury. The first commissioning phase (performed in the period November 2018 - August 2019) allowed to verify the functionality of the instrument itself as well as of the related data handling and archiving system. Moreover, the acceleration measurements gathered in this time frame allow to envisage the potentiality of such an instrument as a high-accuracy monitor of the spacecraft mechanical environment. Keywords Accelerometer · BepiColombo · Radioscience · Mercury · Precise orbit determination · Non-gravitational perturbations · Space instrumentation · Structural vibrations monitoring · Gravitation
1 Introduction Among the scientific objectives of the ESA mission BepiColombo (BC), an important part is given by those dedicated to the study of the Hermean geophysics, as well as to dedicated tests of the laws of gravitation, by employing the Mercury Planetary Orbiter (MPO, one of the two probes making up the mission) as a test mass in the Mercury gravity field. In order to fulfil these objectives, the Mercury Orbiter Radioscience Experiments (MORE) have been set up (Iess et al. 2020; Genova et al. 2020). The MPO spacecraft hosts a suite of instruments that enable a precise measurement of the MPO orbital motion and its dynamics, which are the key elements to reconstruct the gravitational field and rotation state of the planet and to test selected predictions of General Relativity, along with the ones of alternative theories of gravitation (Milani et al. 2001, 2002; Imperi and Iess 2015; Schettino et al. 2015, 2016; Will The BepiColombo mission to Mercury Edited by Johannes Benkhoff, Go Murakami and Ayako Matsuoka
B F. Santoli
[email protected]
1
Istituto di Astrofisica e Planetologia Spaziali–IAPS, Istituto Nazionale di Astrofisica–INAF, Via Fosso del Cavaliere 100, 00133, Rome, Italy
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2014). In the procedure of orbit determination and parameter estimation (usually called POD — precise orbit determination), a model for the orbital dynamics of the spacecraft is fitted to the tracking data. The model is required to be sufficiently accurate to describe this dynamics at a level comparable to the information content of tracking. It has to be noticed that, while the majority of the forces acting on the spacecraft once in orbit around Mercury comes from the gravitational attraction of the primary as well as from the attraction of the other bodies in the Solar S
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