During the period spanning the second Enceladus flyby in July 2005 through the eleventh Titan encounter in January 2006, the Cassini spacecraft was successfully navigated through eight close-targeted satellite encounters. Three of these encounters included the 500 km flybys of the icy satellites Hyperion, Dione and Rhea and five targeted flybys of Saturn's largest moon, Titan. This paper will show how our refinements to Saturn's satellite ephemerides have improved orbit determination predictions. These refinements include the mass estimates of Saturn and its satellites by better than 0.5%. Also, it will be shown how this better orbit determination performance has helped to eliminate several statistical maneuvers that were scheduled to clean-up orbit determination and/or maneuver-execution errors.
Cassini Orbit Determination Performance during Saturn Satellite Tour: August 2005 - January 2006
AAS/AIAA Astrodynamics Specialists Conference ; 2007 ; Mackinac Island, MI, United States
2007-08-19
Conference paper
No indication
English
navigation , Cassini , Titan , Saturn , Dione , orbit determination , Rhea , Astronomy
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