Satellite Laser Ranging and General Relativity

Satellite Laser Ranging and General Relativity

Testing General Relativity with LAGEOSs and Ajisai laser-ranged satellites

The accuracy reached in the past few years by Satellite Laser Ranging (SLR) allows for measuring even tiny features of the Earth’s gravitational field predicted by Einstein’s General Relativity by means of artificial satellites. The gravitomagnetic dragging of the orbit of a test body is currently under measurement by analyzing a suitable combination of the orbital residuals of LAGEOS and LAGEO...

The impact of the static part of the Earth’s gravity field on some tests of General Relativity with Satellite Laser Ranging

In this paper we calculate explicitly the secular classical precessions of the node Ω and the perigee ω of an Earth artificial satellite induced by the static, even zonal harmonics of the geopotential up to degree l = 20. Subsequently, their systematic errors induced by the mismodelling in the even zonal geopotential coefficients Jl are compared to the general relativistic secular gravitomagnet...

Measuring the Relativistic Perigee Advance with Satellite Laser Ranging

The pericenter advance of a test body by a central mass is one of the classical tests of General Relativity. To day this effect is measured with radar ranging by the perihelion shift of Mercury and other planets, in the gravitational field of Sun, with a relative accuracy of the order of 10–10. In this paper we explore the possibility of a measurement of the pericenter advance in the gravitatio...

The impact of the static part of the Earth’s gravity field on some tests of General Relativity with laser–ranging

In this paper we calculate explicitly the secular classical precessions of the node Ω and the perigee ω of an Earth artificial satellite induced by the static, even zonal harmonics of the geopotential up to degree l = 20. Subsequently, their systematic errors induced by the mismodelling in the even zonal geopotential coefficients Jl are compared to the general relativistic secular gravitomagnet...