The Taiwan-America Occultation Survey (TAOS) aims to determine the number of small icy bodies in the outer reach of the Solar System by means of stellar occultation. An array of 4 robotic small (D=0.5 m), wide-field (f/1.9) telescopes have been installed at Lulin Observatory in Taiwan to simultaneously monitor some thousand of stars for such rare occultation events. Because a typical occultatio...

Fig. 1. The German CHAMP satellite (view from antivelocity direction with GPS occultation antennas) Abstract: The German CHAMP (Challenging Minisatellite Payload) satellite (launched on July 15, 2000) is a geoscience mission aiming for the determination of Earth’s gravity and magnetic field and for GPS-based atmospheric sounding. The atmospheric profiling experiment onboard CHAMP was started in...

The PHOT (Portable High-Speed Occultation Telescope) systems were developed for the specific purpose of observing stellar occultations by solar system objects. Stellar occultations have unique observing constraints: they may only be observable from certain parts of the globe; they often require a rapid observing cadence; and they require accurate timestamp information for each exposure. The PHO...

We revisit the GSC5249-01240 light curve obtained during its occultation by Saturn’s North polar region. In addition to refractive scintillations, the power spectrum of intensity fluctuations shows an enhancement of power between refractive and diffractive regimes. We identify this excess power as due to high amplitude spikes in the light curve and suggest that these spikes are due to caustics ...

GPS radio occultation technique has been developed resulting from remote sensing applications in planetary atmospheric limb sounding pioneered by JPL and Stanford University in 1960s. Since the launch of the experimental satellite MicroLab1 on April 3 1995, the primary results from this Low Earth orbiter (LEO) satellite demonstrated potential scienti:c values and practical signi:cance of this i...

[1] We present the Radio Occultation Scintillation Simulator (ROSS), which uses the multiple phase screen method (MPS) to simulate the forward scatter of radio waves by irregularities in the equatorial ionosphere during radio occultation experiments. ROSS simulates propagation through equatorial plasma bubbles which are modeled as homogeneous electron density fluctuations modulated by a Chapman...

At the end of September 2009, a new Italian GPS receiver for radio occultation was launched from the Satish Dhawan Space Center (Sriharikota, India) on the Indian Remote Sensing OCEANSAT-2 satellite. The Italian Space Agency has established a set of Italian universities and research centers to implement the overall processing radio occultation chain. After a brief description of the adopted alg...

[1] The Cassini radio science facility provided 13 occultation electron density profiles of Titan during the period of 2006 and 2009. This paper presents the results of all of these occultation observations. It shows that ten of the observed electron density profiles are similar, but three are significantly different. The number of observations is relatively small for meaningful statistical con...

In this work we have proposed a method based on neural networks to directly retrieve dry and wet refractivity and dry pressure profiles in troposphere (which in turn can be used to obtain temperature and humidity profiles) by using COSMIC GPS radio occultation (RO) data. To overcome the constraint of an independent knowledge of one atmospheric parameter at each GPS occultation, we trained diffe...