3.1.4. Relativity.

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3.1.4. Relativity.

The general relativistic effects on near-Earth satellites within the geocentric frame were developed by Huang et al., [1990] and were evaluated by Ries et al., [1991] for applications when processing SLR. These efforts demonstrated that relativistic effects in the solar system barycentric frame or geocentric frame are equivalent when applying the General Theory of Relativity in orbit determination for near-Earth satellites. The geocentric modeling approach proposed by these authors has been generally adopted and is now routinely used within many orbit determination applications.

A method for measuring the relative nodal precession of a pair of Earth-orbiting satellites caused by the gravitational dragging of the orbit plane of each satellite by the Earth's rotation (the Lense-Thirring precession) as predicted by General Relativity has been proposed by Ciufolini [1986] and extensively simulated and conceptually verified by Ries et al., [1994] and Watkins et al., [1990]. In these proposed experiments, a new Lageos satellite (Lageos-3), physically identically to Lageos-1, would be placed in an orbit whose inclination is symmetric about the polar axis with respect to Lageos-1. This configuration can be used to eliminate the influence of error in our knowledge of the longitudinally independent (zonal) part of the Earth's gravitational field to isolate the frame dragging arising from Lense-Thirring precession.