The study of Delta VLBI and doppler navigation for interplanetary spacecraft

Abstract

ISAS (The Institute of Space and Astronautical Science) carries out interplanetary missions. From the viewpoint of navigation, the highest accuracy of orbit determination is required in these missions in the critical orbit phase. Navigation for deep space exploration has always required the acquisition of long arcs of precise doppler and range data to accurately and reliably determine the components of the spacecraft state vectors. Also, the observability of the spacecraft declination from radiometric data becomes very poor for declinations near zero. Therefore we investigate D(Delta)VLBI technique based on the VLBI(Very Long Baseline Interferometry) for orbit determination. In this paper, we describe the orbit determination system by using DVLBI and radiometric observation data.