Determination of the masses of planetary satellites from their mutual gravitational perturbations

Author： Emel’yanov N. Vashkov’yak S. Sheremet’ev K.

ISSN： 0038-0946

Source： Solar System Research, Vol.41, Iss.3, 2007-06, pp. : 203-210

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Abstract

We analyze the possibility of determining the masses of outer planetary satellites from their mutual gravitational perturbations via ground-based observations. Such a technique has been applied in (Emelyanov, 2005b) to determine the mass of the Jovian satellite Himalia. In this paper, we use the least-squares method to compute the errors of satellite masses inferred from simulated observations. We analyze several of the most suitable variants of groups of outer satellites of planets with maximum mutual attraction. We found that the mass of the Satumian satellite Phoebe (S9) can be refined by continuing observations of the satellite S25 Mundilfari until 2027. We show that the masses of other known outer planetary satellites cannot be determined from ground-based observations.