The JPL Planetary and Lunar Ephemerides DE440 and DE441

By R. Park, William M. Folkner, James G. Williams, D. Boggs. 2021

422 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The planetary and lunar ephemerides called DE440 and DE441 have been generated by fitting numerically integrated orbits to ground-based and space-based observations. Compared to the previous general-purpose ephemerides DE430, seven years of new data have been added to compute DE440 and DE441, with improved dynamical models and data calibration. The orbit of Jupiter has improved substantially by fitting to the Juno radio range and Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA) data of the Juno spacecraft. The orbit of Saturn has been improved by radio range and VLBA data of the Cassini spacecraft, with improved estimation of the spacecraft orbit. The orbit of Pluto has been improved from use of stellar occultation data reduced against the Gaia star catalog. The ephemerides DE440 and DE441 are fit to the same data set, but DE441 assumes no damping between the lunar liquid core and the solid mantle, which avoids a divergence when integrated backward in time. Therefore, DE441 is less accurate than DE440 for the current century, but covers a much longer duration of years −13,200 to +17,191, compared to DE440 covering years 1550–2650.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/1939a3ae64fbcd1c19ce3cf61af604ca4cf6e293

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In Astronomy and Astrophysics

1. G. Hobbs
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Citations in the corpus

• The NANOGrav 15 yr Data Set: Observations and Timing of 68 Millisecond Pulsars (2023, methodology): “All timing fits used the JPL DE440 solar system ephemeris (Park et al. 2021) and the TT(BIPM2019) timescale.”
• The NANOGrav 15 yr Data Set: Evidence for a Gravitational-wave Background (2023, methodology): “We adopt the TT(BIPM2019) timescale and the JPL DE440 ephemeris (Park et al. 2021), which improves Jupiter’s orbit with ranging and VLBI observations of the Juno spacecraft.”
• Search for an Isotropic Gravitational-wave Background with the Parkes Pulsar Timing Array (2023, methodology): “The characteristics of this common process are considered for multiple SSEs from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL; DE421, DE438, and DE440), with our fiducial results generated with the most recent DE440 ephemeris (Park et al. 2021).”