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The precise orbit determination of Chang'E-2 is the most important issue for successful mission and scientific applications, while the lunar gravity field model with big uncertainties has large effect on Chang'E-2 orbit determination. Recently, several new gravity models have been produced using the latest lunar satellites tracking data, such as LP165P, SGM150J, GL0900D and GRGM900C. In this paper, the four gravity models mentioned above were evaluated through the power spectra analysis, admittance and coherence analysis. Effect of four lunar gravity models on Chang'E-2 orbit determination performance is investigated and assessed using Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI) tracking data. The overlap orbit analysis, the posteriori data residual, and the orbit prediction are used to evaluate the orbit precision between successive arcs. The LP165P model has better orbit overlap performance than the SGM150J model for Chang'E-2100 km × 100 km orbit and the SGM150J model performs better for Chang'E-2100 km × 15 km orbit, while GL0900D and GRGM900C have the best orbit overlap results for the two types of Chang'E-2 orbit. For the orbit prediction, GRGM900C has the best orbit prediction performance in the four models.

China’s space probe Chang’E-2 began its asteroid exploration mission on April 15, 2012 and had been in space for 243 days before its encounter with Toutatis. With no onboard navigation equipment available, the navigation of CE-2 during its fly-by of the asteroid relied totally on ground-based Unified S-Band (USB) and Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI) tracking data. The orbit determination of Toutatis was achieved by using a combination of optical measurements and radar ranging. On November 30, 2012, CE-2 was targeted at a destination that was 15 km away from the asteroid as it performed its third trajectory correction maneuver. Later orbit determination analysis showed that a correction residual was still present, which necessitated another maneuver on December 12. During the two maneuvers, ground-based navigation faced a challenge in terms of the orbit determination accuracy. With the optimization of our strategy, an accuracy of better than 15 km was finally achieved for the post-maneuver orbit solution. On December 13, CE-2 successfully passed by Toutatis and conducted continuous photographing of Toutatis during the entire process. An analysis of the images that were taken from the solar panel monitoring camera and the satellite attitude information demonstrates that the closest distance obtained between CE-2 and Toutatis (Toutatis’s surface) was 1.9 km, which is considerably better than the 30 km fly-by distance that we originally hoped based on the accuracies that we can obtain on the satellite and Toutatis’ orbits. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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 improvement in terms of both VLBI delay and delay rate data accuracy was achieved with the noise level of X-band band-width synthesis 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-1's 200 km×200 km lunar orbit, for CE-2's 100 km×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 addition, in trying to analyze the Delta Differential One-Way Ranging (ΔDOR) experiments data we concluded that the accuracy of ΔDOR 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 ΔDOR 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×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 (100×100), but for the 15 km×100 km lunar orbit, a higher degree-order model can significantly improve the orbit accuracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]