One EURO for Uranus: the Elliptical Uranian Relativity Orbiter mission

Abstract

Recent years have seen increasing interest in sending a mission to Uranus, visited so far only by Voyager 2 in 1986. EURO (Elliptical Uranian Relativity Orbiter) is a preliminary mission concept investigating the possibility of dynamically measuring the planet's angular momentum by means of the Lense-Thirring effect affecting a putative Uranian orbiter. It is possible, at least in principle, to separate the relativistic precessions of the orbital inclination to the Celestial Equator and of the longitude of the ascending node of the spacecraft from its classical rates of the pericentre induced by the multipoles of the planet's gravity field by adopting an appropriate orbital configuration. For a wide and elliptical $2\,000\times 100\,000\,\mathrm{km}$ orbit, the gravitomagnetic signatures amount to tens of milliarcseconds per year, while, for a suitable choice of the initial conditions, the peak-to-peak amplitude of the range-rate shift can reach the level of $\simeq 1.5\times 10^{-3}$ millimetre per second in a single pericentre passage of a few hours. By lowering the apocentre height to $10\,000\,\mathrm{km}$, the Lense-Thirring precessions are enhanced to the level of hundreds of milliarcseconds per year. The uncertainties in the orientation of the planetary spin axis and in the inclination are major sources of systematic bias; it turns out that they should be determined with accuracies as good as $\simeq 0.1-1$ and $\simeq 1-10$ milliarcseconds, respectively.