Atmospheric Media Calibration for the Deep Space Network

Two tropospheric calibration systems have been developed at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) using different technologies to achieve different levels of accuracy, timeliness, and range of coverage for support of interplanetary NASA flight operations. The first part of this paper describes an automated GPS-based system that calibrates the zenith tropospheric delays. These calibrations cover all times and can be mapped to any line of sight using elevation mapping functions. Thus they can serve any spacecraft with no prior scheduling or special equipment deployment. Centimeter-level accuracy is provided with 1-h latency and better than 1-cm accuracy after 12 h, limited primarily by rapid fluctuations of the atmospheric water vapor. The second part describes a more accurate line-of-sight media calibration system that is primarily based on a narrow beam, gain-stabilized advanced water vapor radiometer developed at JPL. We discuss experiments that show that the wet troposphere in short baseline interferometry can be calibrated such that the Allan standard deviation of phase residuals, a unitless measure of the average fractional frequency deviation, is better than 2times10^-15 on time scales of 2000 to approximately 10 000 s.