A new proposal for measuring the Lense-Thirring effect with a pair of supplementary satellites in the gravitational field of the Earth

TL;DR

This paper proposes a novel method using a pair of supplementary satellites to measure the Earth's Lense-Thirring effect, enhancing previous approaches by utilizing both the sum of the nodes and the difference of the perigees.

Contribution

It introduces a new approach employing supplementary satellite pairs and considers both node sums and perigee differences for improved measurement of the Lense-Thirring effect.

Findings

Both the sum of the nodes and the difference of the perigees can be used effectively.

The proposed method could improve the accuracy of measuring the Lense-Thirring effect.

The approach extends previous methods like the LAGEOS-LARES mission.

Abstract

In this letter we further analyze the concept of the use of a pair of identical geodetic satellites placed in identical orbits except for the inclinations which should be supplementary for measuring the Lense-Thirring effect in the terrestrial gravitational field. It turns out that not only the sum of the nodes, as already proposed for the LAGEOS-LARES mission, but also the difference of the perigees could be fruitfully adopted.