Searcharxiv⌕ Search

arXiv subjects

Nianchuan Jian

Publications and source records attributed to Nianchuan Jian.

2 recordsLinked to original sources

Numerical model of Phobos' motion incorporating the effects of free rotation

High-precision ephemerides are not only useful in supporting space missions, but also in investigating the physical nature of celestial bodies. This paper reports an update to the orbit and rotation model of the Martian moon Phobos. In contrast to earlier numerical models, this paper details a dynamical model that fully considers the rotation of Phobos. Here, Phobos' rotation is first described by Euler's rotational equations and integrated simultaneously with the orbital motion equations. We discuss this dynamical model, along with the differences with respect to the model now in use. We present the variational equation for Phobos' rotation employing the symbolic \emph{Maple} computation software. The adjustment test simulations confirm the latitude libration of Phobos, suggesting gravity field coefficients obtained using a shape model and homogeneous density hypothesis should be re-examined in the future in the context of dynamics. Furthermore, the simulations with different $k_2$ values indicate that it is difficult to determine k_2 efficiently using the current data.

astro-ph.EP↗

Phase tracking based on GPGPU and applications in Planetary radio Science

This paper introduces a phase tracking method for planetary radio science research with computational algorithm implemented fo r NVIDIA GPUs. In contrast to the phase-locked loop (PPL) phase counting method used in traditional Doppler data processing, this method fits the tracking data signal into the shape expressed by the Taylor polynomial with optimal phase and amplitude coefficients. The Differential Evolution (DE) algorithm is employed for polynomial fitting. In order to cope with high computational intensity of the proposed phase tracking method, the graphics processing units (GPUs) are employed. As a result, the method estimates the instantaneous phase, frequency, derivative of frequency (line-of-sight acceleration) and the total count phase of different integration scales. This data can be further used in planetary radio science research to analyze the planetary occultation and gravitational fields. The method has been tested on MEX (Mars Express, ESA) and Chang'E 4 relay satellite (China) tracking data. In a real experiment with 400K data block size and $\sim$80,000 DE solver objective function evaluations we were able to acheive the target convergence threshold in 6.5 seconds and do real-time processing on NVIDIA GTX580 and 2$\times$ NVIDIA K80 GPUs, respectively. The precision of integral Doppler (60s) is 2 mrad/s and 4 mrad/s for MEX(3-way) and Chang'E 4 relay satellite(3-way) respectively.

astro-ph.IM↗