Cassini Orbit Determination Performance (July 2008 - December 2011)

This paper reports on the orbit determination performance for the Cassini spacecraft from July 2008 to December 2011. During this period, Cassini made 85 revolutions around Saturn and had 52 close satellite encounters. 35 of those were with the massive Titan, 13 with the small, yet interesting, Enceladus as well as 2 with Rhea and 2 with Dione. The period also includes 4 double encounters, where engineers had to plan the trajectory for two close satellite encounters within days of each other at once. Navigation performance is characterized by ephemeris errors relative to in-flight predictions. Most Titan encounters 3-dimensional results are within a 1.5 formal sigma, with a few exceptions, mostly attributable to larger maneuver execution errors. Results for almost all other satellite encounter reconstructions are less than 3 sigma from their predictions. The errors are attributable to satellite ephemerides errors and in some cases to maneuver execution errors.