Phenomenology of the Lense-Thirring effect in the Solar System: Measurement of frame-dragging with laser ranged satellites

History of the attempts to measure orbital frame-dragging with artificial satellites

“…Its proponent aims to reach a 1% accuracy [94] by combining its data with those of the other two existing satellites of the Lageos family. For a debate about the feasibility of such an ambitious goal, see [16,28,[94][95][96][97][98][99]. However, some years will be needed to obtain the first results.…”

“…First, it was noticed that after the first attempts about 15 years ago no really independent tests have been published so far in peer-reviewed journals by authors different from I. Ciufolini, apart from 10 a handful of conference talks by a group led by Ries et al [151][152][153][154] who even joined later the team of Ciufolini himself. Their results were included in [16,98,[155][156][157]. Although different orbital processors were used by Ries et al, the strategy followed so far was always the same as in the earlier works by Ciufolini et al in the sense that frame-dragging was neither explicitly modeled nor solved-for in the Lageos data.…”

LARES successfully launched in orbit: Satellite and mission description

“…It has to be considered that the accurate measurement will require a number of years during which the effects of some periodical perturbations will average to zero and the knowledge of the gravitational field of Earth will improve due to the analysis of new data from the GRACE (Gravity Recovery And Climate Experiment) and GOCE (Gravity field and steady-state Ocean Circulation Explorer) missions. We finally point out that the concerns raised by one author, see, e.g., [60] are not based on solid grounds as clearly addressed and answered in a number of papers, see, e.g., [12,40,41] and references therein. The comments of that author [60] in regard to the errors due to the higher degree even zonal harmonics and to other conceivable error sources in the LARES experiment are often even contradicting each other as pointed out, e.g., in [41].…”

“…We finally point out that the concerns raised by one author, see, e.g., [60] are not based on solid grounds as clearly addressed and answered in a number of papers, see, e.g., [12,40,41] and references therein. The comments of that author [60] in regard to the errors due to the higher degree even zonal harmonics and to other conceivable error sources in the LARES experiment are often even contradicting each other as pointed out, e.g., in [41].…”

“…The basic idea of the LARES experiment is to accurately reconstruct the actual orbit from laser ranging data and to compare it with the theoretical one obtained using all the forces and perturbations acting on the satellite [35,36]. Very important in this comparison is the level of accuracy reached in the knowledge of the classical forces and perturbations [12,[37][38][39][40][41][42][43]. In 1998 a first version of the LARES mission was presented in response to a call issued by ASI in 1997.…”