A reassessment of the systematic gravitational error in the LARES mission

In this letter we reexamine the evaluation of the error due to the even zonal harmonics of the geopotential in some proposed tests of relativistic gravitomagnetism with existing and proposed laser–ranged LAGEOS–like satellites in the gravitational field of the Earth. A more conservative and realistic approach is followed by using the diagonal part only of the covariance matrix of the EGM96 Earth’s gravity model up to degree l = 20. It turns out that, within this context and according to the present level of knowledge of the terrestrial gravitational field, the best choice would be the use of a recently proposed combination using the nodes Ω of LAGEOS, LAGEOS II and LARES and the perigees ω of LAGEOS II and LARES. Indeed, it turns out to be insensitive both to the even zonal harmonics of degree higher than l = 20 and to the correlation among them.