Dottorato in INGEGNERIA AERONAUTICA E SPAZIALE

Titolo della tesi: The tidal response, pole motion and mass of Jupiter determined with Juno radio tracking data

The Juno mission arrived at the Jupiter system in July 2016 and is currently on a 53-day orbit around the planet. Radio tracking data (Doppler and range), sent from NASA Earth stations to Juno and retransmitted coherently by the spacecraft, are fit- ted to a dynamical model of the probe’s motion to reconstruct its trajectory while solving for key geophysical parameters related to Jupiter’s gravity. The highly accu- rate Doppler data collected for the Juno gravity experiment allow to potentially ob- serve features related to Jupiter’s gravity that were never determined before. In this thesis, we present the prospects of determining Jupiter’s satellite-dependent tidal re- sponse and the non-linear motion of its spin axis (which is tied to the planet’s polar moment of inertia) with Juno tracking data at the end of the mission. The deter- mination of those effects required developing novel dynamical models for the orbit determination software, which are thoroughly described in the thesis. We also re- port on the analysis of the gravity science dataset available at the time of writing of the thesis, comparing it with the expectations from numerical simulations. Lastly, we present the improvement on the determination of Jupiter’s mass that can be ob- tained using tracking data collected throughout the 53-day orbit of Juno both for gravity science and for navigation.