Testing General Relativity with LAGEOS, LAGEOS II and Ajisai laser-ranged satellites

摘要

The accuracy reached in the past few years by Satellite Laser Ranging (SLR)allows for measuring even tiny features of the Earth's gravitational fieldpredicted by Einstein's General Relativity by means of artificial satellites.The gravitomagnetic dragging of the orbit of a test body is currently undermeasurement by analyzing a suitable combination of the orbital residuals ofLAGEOS and LAGEOS II. The lower bound of the error in this experiment amount to12.92%. It is due to the mismodeling in the even zonal harmonics of thegeopotential which are the most important sources of systematic error. Asimilar approach could be used in order to measure the relativisticgravitoelectric pericenter shift in the field of the Earth with a lower boundof the systematic relative error of 0.6% due to the even zonal harmonics aswell. The inclusion of the ranging data to the Japanese passive geodeticsatellite Ajisai would improve such limits to 10.78% and 0.08% respectively andwould allow to improve the accuracy in the determination of the PPN parametersbeta and gamma.