N ov 2 00 6 A comment on the paper “ On the orbit of the LARES satellite

In this note we comment on a recent paper by I.Ciufolini about the possibility of placing the proposed LARES satellite in a low-altitude, nearly polar orbit in order to measure the Lense-Thirring effect with its node. While Ciufolini claims that for a departure of 4 deg from the ideal polar configuration the impact of the even zonal harmonics of the geopotential, modelled with EIGEN-GRACE02S, would be nearly zero allowing for a few-percent measurement of the Lense-Thirring effect, we find that, with the same Earth gravity model and for the same values of the inclination, the systematic error due to the even zonals amounts to 64% of the investigated relativistic effect. 1 The polar configuration for measuring the Lense-