On the Systematic Errors in the Detection of the Lense-Thirring Effect with a Mars Orbiter

TL;DR

This paper critically examines the claimed precision in detecting the Lense-Thirring effect with a Mars orbiter, revealing that systematic errors significantly undermine the reported accuracy, making the claim unreliable.

Contribution

It demonstrates that previous error estimates overlooked key systematic errors, leading to a gross underestimation of the true measurement uncertainty.

Findings

The claimed 0.5% error is underestimated by a factor of at least 10,000.

Systematic errors in out-of-plane acceleration dominate the measurement uncertainty.

Realistic error margins are approximately 30 to 48 times larger than previously claimed.

Abstract

We show here that the recent claim of a test of the Lense-Thirring effect with an error of 0.5% using the Mars Global Surveyor is misleading and the quoted error is incorrect by a factor of at least ten thousand. Indeed, the simple error analysis of [1] neglects the role of some important systematic errors affecting the out-of-plane acceleration. The preliminary error analysis presented here shows that even an optimistic uncertainty for this measurement is at the level of, at least, ~ 3026% to ~ 4811%, i.e., even an optimistic uncertainty is about 30 to 48 times the Lense-Thirring effect. In other words by including only some systematic errors we obtained an uncertainty almost ten thousand times larger than the claimed 0.5% error.