Engineering topics
Publications and source records attributed to Konopliv, A..
Principal Data Products: Ensemble of L-maps from SPC, Spacecraft state, Asteroid pole and rotation. Secondary Products: Global topography model, inertia tensor, gravity. Composite high resolution topography. Three dimensional image maps.
A describtion of the Mars Global Surveyor mission and its trajectory will be provided, followed by a discussion of the orbit determination estimation procedure and models.
This paper presents orbit determination work conducted at JPL for the purpose of refining the Mars gravity field as part of the radio science investigation.
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Orbit determination of the Lunar Prospector spacecraft performed at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory was conducted as part of the lunar gravity experiment.
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The terminal navigation of the Near-Earth Asteroid Rendezvous (NEAR) spacecraft during its flyby of asteroid 433 Eros on December 23, 1998 involved coordinated efforts to determine the heliocentric orbits of the spacecraft and Eros and then to determine the relative trajectory of the spacecraft with respect ot Eros.
The Lunar Prospector spacecraft has mapped the gravity field of the Moon to a level of resolution never achieved before, and a spherical harmonic representation to degree and order 100 is available. When combined with the topography dataset produced by the Clementine mission, the resulting Bouguer anomaly map is interpreted to model the thickness of the lunar crust. Such models are crucial to understanding the lunar thermal history and the formation of geological features such as mascon basins, several more of which have been newly discovered from this dataset. A two-layer planetary model was used to compute the variations of the depth to the lunar Moho. The thickness values ranged from near 0 to 120 km. There is significant agreement with previous work using the Clementine gravitational field data with differences in specific locations such as South Pole-Aitken Basin, for example.
We present an improved 360 degree and order spherical harmonic solution for Venus' topography. The new model uses the most recent set of Venus altimetry data with spacecraft positions derived from a recent high resolution gravity model.
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The technological development of solar electric propulsion has advanced significantly over the last few years. Mission planners are now seriously studying which missions would benefit most from solar electric propulsion (SEP) and NASA's Solar System Exploration Division is contributing funding to ground and space qualification tests. In response to the impending release of NASA's Announcement of Opportunity for Discovery class planetary missions, we have undertaken a pre-Phase A study of a SEP mission to the Moon. This mission will not only return a wealth of new scientific data but will open up a whole new era of planetary exploration.
Cycle 5 data collection began on August 6, 1993 when the Magellan spacecraft completed the aerobraking phase.