AAS 97-699
GALILEO ORBIT DETERMINATION RESULTS DURING THE SATELLITE TOUR
P.G. Antreasian, T.P. McElrath, R.J. Haw, G.D. Lewis, T. Krisher - Jet Propulsion Laboratory
Abstract
Following its arrival at Jupiter in December, 1995, the Galileo spacecraft embarked on a tour of the Galilean satellites, starting with the first Ganymede encounter in June, 1996. Despite the limited tracking resources available to Galileo due to its low gain antenna performance, navigational accuracies are exceeding predictions. This paper will describe the orbit determination results during the first seven encounters of the satellite tour. Operational methods and strategies used to determine the spacecraft and satellite orbits from the available Doppler tracking and optical navigation data will be discussed and the actual results will be compared against the predicted delivery accuracies.