Radio metric orbit determination for the Giotto mission to Comet Halley

An international fleet of five spacecraft will fly past Comet Halley as it travels through the inner solar system in early 1986. This paper discusses orbit determination problems associated with the Giotto spacecraft, sponsored by the European Space Agency. The large number of spin axis precession maneuvers required to maintain the desired spacecraft attitude creates a new kind of radio metric orbit determination problem for this mission. This paper investigates the accuracy with which the Giotto spacecraft orbit can be determined relative to the earth or the sun, and establishes the sensitivity of this accuracy to the selection of the parameters to be estimated, the form of estimator used, the number of tracking stations employed, the length of the data arc, the selection of data types processed, and the levels of various error sources.