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Viscoelastic Tides of Mercury and the Determination of its Inner Core Size
Oberst, J.; Stark, A.; Steinbrügge, G. +3 more
We computed interior structure models of Mercury and analyzed their viscoelastic tidal response. The models are consistent with MErcury Surface, Space Environment, GEochemistry, and Ranging mission inferences of mean density, mean moment of inertia, moment of inertia of mantle and crust, and tidal Love number k2. Based on these constrai…
An analysis of the geodesy and relativity experiments of BepiColombo
Iess, Luciano; Imperi, Luigi; Mariani, Mirco J.
BepiColombo is a ESA-JAXA mission aimed to a comprehensive exploration of Mercury, the innermost planet of the solar system. The Mercury Orbiter Radio science Experiment (MORE) will exploit a state of the art microwave tracking system, including an advanced Ka-band transponder, to determine the gravity field and the rotational state of the planet,…
The performance of the BepiColombo Laser Altimeter (BELA) prior launch and prospects for Mercury orbit operations
Oberst, J.; Stark, A.; Steinbrügge, G. +2 more
We explore the perspectives of the BepiColombo Laser Altimeter (BELA) onboard ESA / JAXA's Mercury mission BepiColombo and present an updated semi-analytical instrument performance model, in which we estimate signal-to-noise ratio, single shot probability of false detection, range errors and the accuracy of pulse width reconstruction. The model is…
Addressing some critical aspects of the BepiColombo MORE relativity experiment
Schettino, Giulia; Serra, Daniele; Tommei, Giacomo +1 more
The Mercury Orbiter Radio science Experiment (MORE) is one of the experiments on-board the ESA/JAXA BepiColombo mission to Mercury, to be launched in October 2018. Thanks to full on-board and on-ground instrumentation performing very precise tracking from the Earth, MORE will have the chance to determine with very high accuracy the Mercury-centric…