Confirming the Lense-Thirring Orbital Precession with Satellite Laser Ranging to the LAGEOS Satellites and GRACE Gravity Models

Details Confirming the Lense-Thirring Orbital Precession with Satellite Laser Ranging to the LAGEOS Satellites and GRACE Gravity Models Confirming the Lense-Thirring Orbital Precession with Satellite Laser Ranging to the LAGEOS Satellites and GRACE Gravity Models

Jan 2012

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2012aas...21912204r&link_type=abstract

American Astronomical Society, AAS Meeting #219, #122.04

Astronomy and Astrophysics

Astronomy

Scientific paper

The theory of General Relativity predicts several non-Newtonian effects that have been confirmed by experiment, to considerable accuracy in some cases, but directly confirming the "frame dragging" effect has been challenging. One manifestation of this effect is the Lense-Thirring precession of a satellite's orbital plane due to the Earth's rotation. While the signal is large enough to be easily observed with satellite laser ranging, the Lense-Thirring measurement uncertainty is limited by the knowledge of the even zonal harmonics of the Earth's gravity field that produce similar but much larger Newtonian secular orbit precessions. In the late 1980's, it was proposed to launch the LAGEOS-3 satellite matching LAGEOS-1, except that the orbit inclination would be exactly supplementary to LAGEOS-1. This would have allowed the cancellation of the equal but opposite orbit precession due to the Earth's gravity field to reveal the Lense-Thirring precession. At about the same time, LAGEOS-2 was being prepared for launch, but the orbit selected for that satellite was not sufficiently close to the proposed LAGEOS-3 orbit specifications to support an accurate Lense-Thirring experiment with the available gravity models. However, the problem of the uncertainty in the knowledge of the Earth's gravity field has been largely overcome with the dramatically improved models resulting from the joint NASA-DLR Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) mission. Using laser ranging to LAGEOS-1 and LAGEOS-2, it is now possible to confirm the General Relativity prediction of the Lense-Thirring precession with an uncertainty better than 15%.
This research was supported by NASA Contract NNG06DA07C.

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