Towards a few-percent measurement of the Lense-Thirring effect with the LAGEOS and LAGEOS II satellites?

Abstract

Up to now attempts to measure the general relativistic Lense-Thirring effect in the gravitational field of Earth have been performed by analyzing a suitable J_2-J_4-free combination of the nodes Omega of LAGEOS and LAGEOS II and the perigee omega of LAGEOS II with the Satellite Laser Ranging technique. The claimed total accuracy is of the order of 20-30%, but, according to some scientists, it could be an optimistic estimate. The main sources of systematic errors are the mismodelling in the even zonal harmonic coefficients J_l of the multipolar expansion of the gravitational potential of Earth and the non-gravitational perturbations which plague especially the perigee of LAGEOS II and whose impact on the proposed measurement is difficult to be reliably assessed. Here we present some evaluations of the accuracy which could be reached with a different J_2-free observable built up with the nodes of LAGEOS and LAGEOS II in view of the new preliminary 2nd-generation Earth gravity models from the GRACE mission. According to the GRACE-only based EIGEN-GRACE02S solution, a 1-sigma upper bound of 4% for the systematic error due to the even zonal harmonics can be obtained. In the near future it could be possible to perform a reliable measurement of the Lense-Thirring effect by means of the existing LAGEOS satellites with an accuracy of a few percent by adopting a time span of a few years. The choice of a not too long observational temporal interval would be helpful in reducing the impact of the secular variations of the uncancelled even zonal harmonics dot J_4 and dot J_6 whose impact is difficult to be reliably evaluated.