Thesis title: Advanced radiometric tracking techniques for accurate Deep Space navigation
The scope of the work is to show the improvements attainable in all radiometric tracking techniques (i.e. Doppler, ranging and Dleta-DOR), by the use of higher frequency for radiometric tracking and a dedicated suite of calibration instruments for the cancellation of major error sources affecting such tracking techniques.
The work is structured in four main sections. The first provides the review of state of the art radiometric tracking performance and the related error modelling. Then, the description of the necessary improvement in the most relevant areas especially focusing on the ground segment is given. The plans and results of the validation steps carried out so far are illustrated in a dedicated section and finally preliminary end-to-end results coming from the first data of the BepiColombo radio-science experiment are presented, before drawing final conclusions and further work to be done.