Earth Albedo and the orbit of LAGEOS

Details Earth Albedo and the orbit of LAGEOS Earth Albedo and the orbit of LAGEOS

Jun 1985

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=1985stin...8532131r&link_type=abstract

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Physics

Albedo, Bouguer Law, Earth (Planet), Lageos (Satellite), Quantum Mechanics, Formalism, Reflectance, Satellite Orbits, Spherical Harmonics

Scientific paper

The long-period perturbations in the orbit of the Lageos satellite due to the Earth's albedo have been found using a new analytical formalism. The Earth is assumed to be a sphere whose surface diffusely reflects sunlight according to Lambert's law. Specular reflection is not considered. The formalism is based on spherical harmonics; it produces equations which hold regardless of whether the terminator is seen by the satellite or not. Specializing to the case of a realistic zonal albedo shows that Lageos' orbital semimajor axis changes periodically by only the a few millimeters and the eccentricity by one part in 100,000. The longitude of the node increases secularly. The effect considered here can explain neither the secular decay of 1.1 mm/day in the semimajor axis nor the observed along-track variations in acceleration of order 2 x 10 to the minus 12 power/sq ms.

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