Orbit determination for Chang'E-2 lunar probe and evaluation of lunar gravity models

The Unified S-Band （USB） ranging/Doppler system and the Very Long Baseline Interferometry （VLBI） system as the ground tracking system jointly supported the lunar orbit capture of both Chang＇E-2 （CE-2） and Chang＇E-1 （CE-1） missions. The tracking system is also responsible for providing precise orbits for scientific data processing. New VLBI equipment and data processing strategies have been proposed based on CE-1 experiences and implemented for CE-2. In this work the role VLBI tracking data played was reassessed through precision orbit determination （POD） experiments for CE-2. Significant improve- ment in terms of both VLBI delay and delay rate data accuracy was achieved with the noise level of X-band band-width syn- thesis delay data reaching 0.2-0.3 ns. Short-arc orbit determination experiments showed that the combination of only 15 min＇s range and VLBI data was able to improve the accuracy of 3 h＇s orbit using range data only by a 1-1.5 order of magnitude, confirming a similar conclusion for CE-1. Moreover, because of the accuracy improvement, VLBI data was able to contribute to CE-2＇s long-arc POD especially in the along-track and orbital normal directions. Orbital accuracy was assessed through the orbital overlapping analysis （2 h arc overlapping for 18 h POD arc）. Compared with about 100 m position error of CE-l＇s 200 kin x 200 km lunar orbit, for CE-2＇s 100 km x 100 km lunar orbit, the position errors were better than 31 and 6 m in the radial direction, and for CE-2＇s 15 km^100 km orbit, the position errors were better than 45 and 12 m in the radial direction. In addi- tion, in trying to analyze the Delta Differential One-Way Ranging （ADOR） experiments data we concluded that the accuracy of ADOR delay was dramatically improved with the noise level better than 0.1 ns and systematic errors better calibrated, and the Short-arc POD tests with ADOR data showed excellent results. Although unable to support the development of an independent lunar gravity model, the tracking data of CE-2 provided evaluations of different lunar gravity models through POD. It is found that for the 100 km x 100 km lunar orbit, with a degree and order expansion up to 165, JPL＇s gravity model LP165P did not show noticeable improvement over Japan＇s SGM series models （100x100）, but for the 15 kmxl00 km lunar orbit, a higher de- gree-order model can significantly improve the orbit accuracy.