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.


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    Title :

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


    Contributors:


    Publication date :

    2015




    Type of media :

    Article (Journal)


    Type of material :

    Print


    Language :

    English



    Classification :

    BKL:    50.93 / 50.93 Weltraumforschung / 55.60 Raumfahrttechnik / 55.60




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