Astrodynamics: A Contributor to Planetary Science
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Where
Dr. Moriba Jah
Director, UA Space Domain Awareness Initiatives
University of Arizona
We live in a world saturated with information, where this information is encoded in a variety of media. To understand certain geophysical and climatological processes, scientists take bore samples in the Arctic, revealing many millennia of knowledge regarding Earth changes. For communications, we encoded information onto propagated waves where ones and zeros are interpreted from various wave and optical modulations. Analogous to this, are the trajectories of space objects which can be interpreted as being encoded with information from all motion-forcing/shaping sources. The flight path of any space object is driven by the gravitational and non-gravitational forces it experiences and these "modulate" its Astrodynamics signature. The contribution to be made to planetary science by Astrodynamics is found in successfully "inverting Astrodynamics signatures" or "de modulating space object trajectories" and thus decoding the information content impressed upon the space object from planetary bodies, assuming relevant state and parameter observability in an estimation sense.