Results of the VEGA Pathfinder concept which was used to successfully target the European Space Agnecy's Giotto spacecraft to a 600 km encounter with the comet Halley are presented. Pathfinder was an international cooperative navigation activity involving USSR, European and U.S. space agencies. The final Giotto targeting maneuver was based on a comet location determined from optical data acquired by the earlier arriving Soviet VEGA spacecraft. Inertial pointing angles extracted from optical images of the comet nucleus were combined with a precise estimate of the VEGA encounter orbits determined using VLBI data acquired by NASA's Deep Space Network to predict the location of Halley at Giotto encounter. This article describes the VLBI techniques used to determine the VEGA orbits and shows that the insensitivity of the VLBI data strategy to unmodeled dynamic error sources resulted in estimates of the VEGA orbits with an accuracy of 50 km.


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    Titel :

    Vega Pathfinder Navigation for Giotto Halley Encounter


    Beteiligte:
    J. Ellis (Autor:in) / T. P. Mcelrath (Autor:in)

    Erscheinungsdatum :

    1986


    Format / Umfang :

    11 pages


    Medientyp :

    Report


    Format :

    Keine Angabe


    Sprache :

    Englisch




    VEGA Pathfinder navigation for Giotto Halley encounter

    Ellis, J. / Mcelrath, T. P. | NTRS | 1986




    Interplanetary Magnetic Field During the Giotto Encounter and the Induced Magnetosphere of Comet Halley

    Israelevich, P. L. / Neubauer, F. M. / Ershkovich, A. I. et al. | British Library Conference Proceedings | 1995


    GIOTTO : the second encounter

    European Space Agency | SLUB | 1992