On the impossibility of using certain existing spacecraft for the measurement of the Lense-Thirring effect in the terrestrial gravitational field

Abstract

In the context of the currently ongoing efforts to improve the accuracy and reliability of the measurement of the Lense-Thirring effect in the gravitational field of the Earth it has recently been proposed to use the data from the existing spacecraft endowed with some active mechanisms of compensation of the non-gravitational accelerations like GRACE. In this paper we critically discuss this interesting possibility. Unfortunately, it turns out to be unpracticable because of the impact of the uncancelled even zonal harmonic coefficients of the multipolar expansion of the terrestrial gravitational potential and of some time-dependent tidal perturbations which would resemble as superimposed linear trends over the necessarily limited observational time span of the analysis.

LaTex2e, 13 pages, no figures, no tables, 31 references. Reference added, Section 2.4 added

References in corpus (3)

• On the reliability of the so far performed tests for measuring the Lense-Thirring effect with the LAGEOS satellites
• The impact of the new Earth gravity models on the measurement of the Lense-Thirring effect with a new satellite
• How to reach a few percent level in determining the Lense-Thirring effect?