A ray-tracing method for in-situ radio occultation experiments: analysis of MAVEN’s ROSE data

Interplanetary exploration has grown during the last years and one of the most popular destination has been Mars planet. A lot of processes occurring in Mars’ atmosphere and on its surface are still unknown. Therefore, the radio occultation technique is used to study the structure of the planet’s atmosphere, consisting in reconstructing the path of the radio signal transmitted by the spacecraft when it travels inside the atmosphere. The goal of this thesis is to test the ray-tracing method for in-situ occultations in order to prove its reliability, suitability, and its uniqueness compared to other methods. This is demonstrated by pursuing an analysis of some in-situ occultations performed by MAVEN mission in 2017. The entire work is done on MATLAB, with the help of the NASA Navigation and Ancillary Information Facility SPICE toolkit. As part of this investigation, the obtained atmospheric profiles are compared with those already available in literature, in order to demonstrate the validity of the algorithm.