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

الأصل · EN

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 a of the semimajor axes a of such spacecrafts, recently measured in an independent way to a σ a≈ 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 J₂. blackIndeed, the systematic bias due to the current measurement errors σ 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. blackTherefore, 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.