Radio science measurements with suppressed carrier

Radio Science started when it became apparent with early deep space missions that occultations by planetary atmospheres would affect the quality of radio communications. Since then the atmospheric properties and other aspects of planetary science, solar science, and fundamental physics were studied by scientists. Radio Science data was always extracted from a received pure residual carrier (without data modulation). For some missions, it is very desirable to obtain Radio Science data from a suppressed carrier modulation. In this paper we propose a method to extract Radio Science data when a coded suppressed carrier modulation is used in deep space communications. The type of modulation can be BPSK, QPSK, OQPSK, MPSK or even GMSK. However we concentrate mostly on BPSK modulation. The proposed method for suppressed carrier simply tries to wipe out data that acts as an interference for Radio Science measurements. In order to measure the estimation errors in amplitude and phase of the Radio Science data we use the Cramer-Rao bound (CRB). The CRB for suppressed carrier modulation with non-ideal data wiping is then compared with residual carrier modulation under the same noise condition. The method of derivation of the CRB for non-ideal data wiping is an innovative method that is presented here. Some numerical results are provided for a coded system.