Can the mass of Martian Moons be measured by Gaia?

Description

The Gaia mission will operate over five years, nominally starting from 2011. Several tens of accurate astrometric and photometric measurements of each of the Solar System bodies will be available. In this work we focus on the specific case of the moons of Mars, whose positions will be known with an uncertainty better than 0.05 mas, never reached by ground or space-based observers. So far, the mass of the Martian moons have been mainly deduced by Viking and Phobos 2 flybys. On the other hand, the mutual perturbations of one moon on the other have never been detected up to now. We investigate this question again, in order to derive the the expected residuals in the current orbit solution due to mutual perturbations. This study represents a first step in our understanding of the role of Gaia for dynamical studies of the natural planetary satellites.

Abstract

International audience

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