Is it possible to measure the Lense-Thirring effect on the orbits of the planets in the gravitational field of the Sun?

TL;DR

This paper investigates the feasibility of measuring the Sun's Lense-Thirring effect on planetary orbits, proposing a novel combination of orbital residuals to overcome systematic errors and improve detection prospects.

Contribution

It introduces a new linear combination method of planetary orbital residuals to isolate the Lense-Thirring effect from classical precessions.

Findings

The Lense-Thirring precession for Mercury is about 10^-3 arcseconds per century.

Current observational sensitivity is just at the edge of detecting these effects.

Future missions could significantly improve the measurement accuracy.

Abstract

Here we explore a novel approach in order to try to measure the post-Newtonian 1/c^2 Lense-Thirring secular effect induced by the gravitomagnetic field of the Sun on the planetary orbital motion. Due to the relative smallness of the solar angular momentum J and the large values of the planetary semimajor axes a, the gravitomagnetic precessions, which affect the nodes Omega and the perihelia omega and are proportional to J/a^3, are of the order of 10^-3 arcseconds per century only for, e.g., Mercury. This value lies just at the edge of the present-day observational sensitivity in reconstructing the planetary orbits, although future missions to Mercury like Messenger and BepiColombo could allow to increase it. The major problems come from the main sources of systematic errors. They are the aliasing classical precessions induced by the multipolar expansion of the Sun's gravitational potential and the classical secular N-body precessions which are of the same order of magnitude or much larger than the Lense-Thirring precessions of interest. This definitely rules out the possibility of analyzing only one orbital element of, e.g., Mercury. In order to circumvent these problems, we propose a suitable linear combination of the orbital residuals of the nodes of Mercury, Venus and Mars which is, by construction, independent of such classical secular precessions. A 1-sigma reasonable estimate of the obtainable accuracy yields a 36% error. Since the major role in the proposed combination is played by the Mercury's node, it could happen that the new, more accurate ephemerides available in future thanks to the Messenger and BepiColombo missions will offer an opportunity to improve the present unfavorable situation.