A decade of astrometric observations of Cassini: Past results and future prospects

Abstract

The Cassini spacecraft has been in orbit about Saturn since 2004. During this time, regular astrometric measurements of Cassini's sky position have been made with the Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA). These are high precision differential measurements that determine the position of Cassini with respect to angularly nearby extragalactic radio sources. Differential, narrow-angle astrometry reduces many error sources, particularly those associated with signal propagation effects in the ionosphere and troposphere. The background radio sources positions are tied to the inertial International Celestial Reference Frame (ICRF) by other international VLBI observations. Thus, we obtain a series of ICRF positions for Cassini, which can be combined with spacecraft orbit solutions from Deep Space Network Doppler tracking to get ICRF positions for the center of mass of the Saturn system. These positions have typical accuracies at the nano-radian level. For some epochs uncertainties in the background source positions are a major component of the total error, but these positions are being constantly improved as additional VLBI observations are incorporated into radio source catalogs. The planetary ephemeris group at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory uses our position measurements to fit improved orbital solutions for Saturn. As a result the orientation of the plane of Saturn's orbit is now known to approximately 0.25 milli-arcseconds (1.25 nrad), nearly an order of magnitude improvement over its pre-VLBA uncertainty. We will continue this observing program until the end of the Cassini mission in late 2017. By that time we will have covered about 1/3 of Saturn's orbital longitude range. Future improvements to this technique will include the use of higher spacecraft downlink frequencies (Ka band instead of X band) and higher ground array sensitivity to permit the use of weaker but angularly closer reference sources. In addition, the continuing international campaigns to enhance the accuracy of radio source catalogs will be extended to weaker sources, improving their ties to the ICRF.