Eur. Phys. J. C (2016) 76: 120
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjc/s10052-016-3961-8

Regular Article - Theoretical Physics

A test of general relativity using the LARES and LAGEOS satellites and a GRACE Earth gravity model

Measurement of Earth’s dragging of inertial frames

¹ Dipartimento Ingegneria dell’Innovazione, Università del Salento, Lecce, Italy
² Museo della fisica e Centro studi e ricerche Enrico Fermi, Rome, Italy
³ Scuola di Ingegneria Aerospaziale, Sapienza Università di Roma, Rome, Italy
⁴ Joint Center for Earth Systems Technology (JCET), University of Maryland, Baltimore County, USA
⁵ Helmholtz Centre Potsdam, GFZ German Research Centre for Geosciences, Potsdam, Germany
⁶ Center for Space Research, University of Texas at Austin, Austin, USA
⁷ Center for Cosmology and Astrophysics, Alikhanian National Laboratory and Yerevan State University, Yerevan, Armenia
⁸ Theory Center, University of Texas at Austin, Austin, USA
⁹ Mathematical Institute, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK
¹⁰ DIAEE, Sapienza Università di Roma, Rome, Italy

^* e-mail: ignazio.ciufolini@gmail.com
^** e-mail: ignazio.ciufolini@unisalento.it

Received: 26 January 2016
Accepted: 17 February 2016
Published online: 4 March 2016

Abstract

We present a test of general relativity, the measurement of the Earth’s dragging of inertial frames. Our result is obtained using about 3.5 years of laser-ranged observations of the LARES, LAGEOS, and LAGEOS 2 laser-ranged satellites together with the Earth gravity field model GGM05S produced by the space geodesy mission GRACE. We measure , where is the Earth’s dragging of inertial frames normalized to its general relativity value, 0.002 is the 1-sigma formal error and 0.05 is our preliminary estimate of systematic error mainly due to the uncertainties in the Earth gravity model GGM05S. Our result is in agreement with the prediction of general relativity.