A spaceborne gravity gradiometer concept based on cold atom interferometers for measuring Earth's gravity field

Abstract

We propose a concept for future space gravity missions using cold atom interferometers for measuring the diagonal elements of the gravity gradient tensor and the spacecraft angular velocity. The aim is to achieve better performance than previous space gravity missions due to a very low white noise spectral behavior and a very high common mode rejection, with the ultimate goals of determining the fine structures of the gravity field with higher accuracy than GOCE and detecting time-variable signals in the gravity field better than GRACE.Comment: 10 pages, 6 figures The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s12217-014-9385-x. appears in Microgravity Science and Technology October 201