The LAGEOS satellites orbit and Yukawa-like interactions

Lucchesi, David

Astronomy and Astrophysics  Geophysics  Atmospheric Science  Aerospace Engineering  General Earth and Planetary Sciences  Space and Planetary Science  Earth's gravity fields 

LAGEOS II general relativity pericenter precession has been analysed in terms of the errors produced by the mismodelling of both the gravitational and non-gravitational perturbations acting on the satellite orbit. The accuracy in the pericenter determination may be considered as an upper-bound value for the estimate of the strength alpha of a possible new-long-range-interaction described by a Yukawa-like potential. In the present work we have focused on the constraints in alpha that can be obtained with the current best multi-satellites gravity field model EGM96 (alpha < 2.6 x 10^-10) and also with the first promising models from the CHAMP (alpha < 1.8 x 10^-10) and GRACE (alpha < 1.2 x 10^-10) gravimetric missions. These results represent, potentially, an improvement of two or three orders-of-magnitude with respect to the best constraints obtained in the past with Earth-LAGEOS and Lunar-LAGEOS data (|alpha| < 10^-5 -- 10^-8). The impact of the non-gravitational perturbations mismodelling in the final error budget has been determined together with the improvements obtainable in the constraint of the strength a with the proposed LARES satellite.

Source: Advances in space research 47 (2011): 1232–1237. doi:10.1016/j.asr.2010.11.029

Publisher: Pergamon,, Oxford , Regno Unito

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