Astronomy & Celestial Mechanics
the sky, computed
Concept

Deep-space network — where it appears

The three antenna complexes in California, Spain and Australia that track spacecraft beyond Earth orbit. Their spacing sets the longest interferometric baselines available, and the geometry means one is always facing any given direction as the Earth turns.

Named by 3 essays across one field — each of them below, with the objects they name alongside it.

An eight-hour pass, and a 351 m s⁻¹ sinusoid that is the whole of the angle. Above: the range rate a two-way Doppler measurement returns over one pass from Goldstone, for a spacecraft receding at 14.6 km s⁻¹. Nothing here is an angle. The measurement is the fractional shift of a carrier the spacecraft coherently turned around and sent back, and its interpretation is that the distance is changing at some rate. Below: the same data with the spacecraft's own smooth signature removed. What is left is a sinusoid of exactly one cycle per day — the station's own motion, carried east at 379 metres a second by the rotation of the Earth, projected onto the line of sight. Its amplitude is that speed times cos δ and returns a declination of 22.0°; its zero crossing is the moment the spacecraft passed the meridian and returns the right ascension. The Earth's rotation is the interferometer. With Doppler good to 0.05 mm s⁻¹ at a 60-second cadence, 480 samples fit that amplitude to 0.003 mm s⁻¹ and the declination to 23 nanoradians — which is 4.7 milliarcseconds, from an instrument with no image plane and no angular resolution of any kind. What the picture cannot show is the part that makes this hard in practice: the spacecraft's own signature is not a straight line but a trajectory with unmodelled accelerations in it, and separating a slow non-gravitational force from a slow drift in the angles is the whole art of the fit.

A position measured from a frequency

A spacecraft is unresolvable and unreachable, and everything known about where it is comes from two scalars — a round-trip light time and a Doppler shift. Neither is an angle. The orbit solution returns two angles anyway, because the antenna is bolted to a rotating planet.

spaceflight · Radiometric navigation A nanosecond across the Earth is 35.69 nanoradians on the sky. The angular accuracy of a differenced-delay measurement against the length of the baseline it is measured on, both axes logarithmic, for three levels of delay precision. The relation is σ_θ = cσ_τ/B and nothing else, so every curve is a straight line of slope −1.00: the only two ways to measure an angle better are a better clock or a wider Earth, and only one of those is available. The three marked baselines are the ones that exist — the deep-space complexes in California, Spain and Australia, 8,400, 10,600, 11,700 kilometres apart. On the longest of them a delay good to 0.05 nanoseconds is 1.28 nanoradians, which at 0.52 astronomical units is 100 metres across the line of sight; a more typical 0.15-nanosecond measurement on the shortest baseline is 5.35 nanoradians. What makes any of this survivable is that the same pair of antennas observes a quasar a few degrees away immediately afterwards. The quasar is at infinity, its position is known better than the measurement, and subtracting its delay from the spacecraft's removes the clock offsets, the water vapour over each dish and the station coordinates in one step — so the number that comes out is not a delay at all but an angular separation from a fixed point in the sky.

An angle measured against a quasar

A tracking station measures how fast a spacecraft is receding, which is one number where three are wanted. The two missing angles come from the Earth's rotation, slowly, and near a planetary encounter there is no time for slowly — so the position is instead measured directly, as a difference of arrival times between two antennas, referred to a quasar a few degrees away.

spaceflight · Radiometric navigation Two interiors, 2.59 mm/s apart, against a floor of 0.02. What a radio link measures when a spacecraft flies past a moon. The horizontal axis is time from closest approach in minutes and the vertical axis is the accumulated change in the line-of-sight velocity in millimetres per second, after the pull of the moon as a point mass has been fitted and removed. What is left is the part of the field that is not spherically symmetric, and the two curves are what two interiors predict for it. The upper one is a body whose tidal Love number is 0.616 — a shell floating on a global liquid layer, free to deform almost as a fluid would. The lower one is a body solid throughout, at 0.03. They differ by 2.59 millimetres per second in the accumulated deflection, against a floor of 0.02 for a coherent two-way X-band link integrated over tens of seconds: 130 standard deviations in a single pass. That ratio is the whole reason the measurement is possible, and it is worth stating what is being compared. The point-mass deflection itself is 837 metres per second — five orders of magnitude larger than the signature of interest — so the interior is not read off the Doppler curve but off the residual left after a model of everything larger has been subtracted: the moon's mass, the planet's, the spacecraft's own thrusting and outgassing, the plasma along the path, the station's motion, and relativity. Every one of those has to be right to a part in a hundred thousand before the last curve here means anything, which is why gravity science needs many passes and a global fit rather than one flyby and a subtraction. The published uncertainty on Titan's k₂ is eleven per cent rather than the fraction of a per cent this signal-to-noise would suggest, and the difference is entirely correlations with the other parameters in that fit — a reminder that a formal error on a curve is not the error on the number extracted from it. The straight-line path assumed here is exact only in the limit of a fast flyby; a slow one bends, and the bending is solved for rather than approximated.

An ocean found in a Doppler residual

A spacecraft flying past a moon is deflected by hundreds of metres a second, and the part of that deflection which says whether the moon has an ocean is two millimetres a second. Everything larger has to be modelled and removed first, exactly, and what is left over is an interior.

spaceflight · Radiometric navigation

Named alongside it

The objects these essays reach for when they reach for this one.

Delta-DOROrbit determinationSystematic errorAngular accuracyBaselineClock offsetCoherent transponderCovarianceDeclinationDifferential measurementDiurnal signatureDoppler tracking

All concepts