Preliminary study for the measurement of the Lense-Thirring effect with the Galileo satellites

Abstract

The precession of the orbital node of a parti-cle orbiting a rotating mass is known as Lense-Thirring effect (LTE) and is a manifestation of the general relativistic phenomenon of drag-ging of inertial frames or frame-dragging. The LTE has already been measured by using the node drifts of the LAGEOS satellites and GRACE-based Earth gravity field models with an accuracy of about 10 % and will be im-proved down to a few percent with the recent LARES experiment. The Galileo system will provide 27 new node observables for the LTE estimation and their combination with the LA-GEOS and LARES satellites can potentially reduce even more the error due to the mismod-eling in Earth’s gravity field. However, the ac-curate determination of the Galileo orbits re-quires the estimation of many different param-∗Corresponding author