The impact of the new Earth gravity model EIGEN-CG03C on the measurement of the Lense-Thirring effect with some existing Earth satellites

TL;DR

This paper evaluates how the new Earth gravity model EIGEN-CG03C affects the precision of measuring the Lense-Thirring effect using satellite data, showing improved error bounds over previous models.

Contribution

It provides an analysis of the impact of the latest gravity model EIGEN-CG03C on Lense-Thirring measurements, highlighting reduced systematic errors in satellite node combinations.

Findings

Systematic error in LAGEOS-LAGEOS II combination is 3.9% with EIGEN-CG03C.

Error in LAGEOS-LAGEOS II-Ajisai-Jason-1 combination is 1%.

EIGEN-CG03C improves measurement accuracy over previous models.

Abstract

The impact of the latest combined CHAMP/GRACE/terrestrial measurements Earth gravity model EIGEN-CG03C on the measurement of the Lense-Thirring effect with some linear combinations of the nodes of some of the existing Earth's artificial satellites is presented. The 1-sigma upper bound of the systematic error in the node-node LAGEOS-LAGEOS II combination is 3.9% (4% with EIGEN-GRACE02S, \sim 6% with EIGEN-CG01C and \sim 9% with GGM02S), while it is 1$% for the node-only LAGEOS-LAGEOS II-Ajisai-Jason-1 combination (2% with EIGEN-GRACE02S, 1.6% with EIGEN-CG01C and 2.7% with GGM02S).