APPLICATION OF DSN SPACECRAFT TRACKING TECHNOLOGY TO EXPERIMENTAL GRAVITATION

Spacecraft tracking technology of the Deep Space Net (DSN) has been used in the past to measure the general relativistic increase in round trip group delay between the Earth and a spacecraft. As the DSN technology continues to improve, other gravitational experiments will become possible. Two possibilities are discussed in this paper. The first concerns the application of solar system dynamics to the testing of general relativity. The second involves the detection of VLF gravitational radiation (10 -1 to 10 -4 Hz) by means of the Doppler tracking of spacecraft. © American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Inc., 1979, All rights reserved.