ESPACE, European Satellite PArtnership for Computing Ephemerides

Abstract

International audienceThe EC FP7 project entitled European Satellite PArtnership for Computing Ephemerides (ESPaCE) aims at strengthening the collaborative activities in the domain of the development of ephemerides and reference systems for natural satellites and spacecraft. An important part of the project addresses the extraction and analysis of astrometric data from observations by spacecraft not yet applied to dynamical solutions. They will be combined with ground-based astrometry in order to improve constraints on the dynamics and the physics of the objects. We will use all these data to provide improved ephemerides for natural satellites and spacecraft and to characterize the rotation properties of selected satellites. We also intend to investigate new technologies relevant to our aims, in particular Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI) and Laser Ranging (LR) techniques. Another important part of the project will include merging (for the first time in Europe) the natural satellite astrometry data with spacecraft data in a global inversion. All the results and documents will be made available using standard formats (VO standard, SPICE kernels) for the use by space agencies and scientific community