The Hera Radio Science Experiment at Didymos
Planetary and Space Science, 2024, 105906 Hera represents the European Space Agency's inaugural planetary defense space mission and plays a pivotal role in the Asteroid Impact and Deflection Assessment international collaboration with NASA DART mission that performed the first asteroid deflecti...
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Main Authors | , , , , , , , , , |
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Format | Journal Article |
Language | English |
Published |
18.10.2023
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Subjects | |
Online Access | Get full text |
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Summary: | Planetary and Space Science, 2024, 105906 Hera represents the European Space Agency's inaugural planetary defense space
mission and plays a pivotal role in the Asteroid Impact and Deflection
Assessment international collaboration with NASA DART mission that performed
the first asteroid deflection experiment using the kinetic impactor techniques.
With the primary objective of conducting a detailed post-impact survey of the
Didymos binary asteroid following the DART impact on its small moon called
Dimorphos, Hera aims to comprehensively assess and characterize the feasibility
of the kinetic impactor technique in asteroid deflection while conducting an
in-depth investigation of the asteroid binary, including its physical and
compositional properties as well as the effect of the impact on the surface and
shape of Dimorphos. In this work, we describe the Hera radio science
experiment, which will allow us to precisely estimate critical parameters,
including the mass, which is required to determine the momentum enhancement
resulting from the DART impact, mass distribution, rotational states, relative
orbits, and dynamics of the asteroids Didymos and Dimorphos. Through a
multi-arc covariance analysis, we present the achievable accuracy for these
parameters, which consider the full expected asteroid phase and are based on
ground radiometric, Hera optical images, and Hera to CubeSats InterSatellite
Link radiometric measurements. The expected formal uncertainties for Didymos
and Dimorphos GM are better than 0.01% and 0.1%, respectively, while their J2
formal uncertainties are better than 0.1% and 10%, respectively. [...] |
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DOI: | 10.48550/arxiv.2310.11883 |