The impact of the orbital decay of the LAGEOS satellites on the frame-dragging tests

Abstract

The laser-tracked geodetic satellites LAGEOS, LAGEOS II and LARES are currently employed, among other things, to measure the general relativistic Lense-Thirring effect in the gravitomagnetic field of the spinning Earth with the hope of providing a more accurate test of such a prediction of the Einstein's theory of gravitation than the existing ones. The secular decay $\dot{a}$ of the semimajor axes $a$ of such spacecrafts, recently measured in an independent way to a ${\sigma }_{\dot{a}}\approx 0.1-0.01$ m yr${}^{-1}$ accuracy level, may indirectly impact the proposed relativistic experiment through its connection with the classical orbital precessions induced by the Earth's oblateness $J_2$. \textcolor{black}{Indeed,} the systematic bias due to the current measurement errors ${\sigma }_{\dot{a}}$ is of the same order of magnitude of, or even larger than, the expected relativistic signal itself; moreover, it grows linearly with the time span $T$ of the analysis. \textcolor{black}{Therefore, the parameter-fitting algorithms must be properly updated in order to suitably cope with such a new source of systematic uncertainty. Otherwise,} an improvement of one-two orders of magnitude in measuring the orbital decay of the satellites of the LAGEOS family would be required to reduce this source of systematic uncertainty to a percent fraction of the Lense-Thirring signature.

LaTex2e, 2 tables, 1 figure, 12 pages. At press in Advances in Space Research (ASR)

References in corpus (5)

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• LARES succesfully launched in orbit: satellite and mission description
• Novel considerations about the error budget of the LAGEOS-based tests of frame-dragging with GRACE geopotential models
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