2004/10/21 by Lorenzo Iorio, Iorio, Lorenzo
Earth and Planetary Sciences · Engineering · Physics and Astronomy · #Astronomical Observations and Instrumentation #Geophysics and Gravity Measurements #Pulsars and Gravitational Waves Research #astro-ph #gr-qc #physics.geo-ph #physics.space-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.gr-qc/0410110
Latex2e, 8 pages, no tables, no figures, 17 references. It refers to the Letter to Nature I. Ciufolini and E.C. Pavlis, Nature, 431, 958-960, 2004. Scientific criticisms on the released error budget presented
arxiv created 2004/10/29 · arxiv updated 2009/12/01
In this brief note some comments about the observable used in a recently published paper on the measurement of the general relativistic Lense-Thirring in the gravitational field of the Earth are presented. It turns out that, among other things, the authors might have yielded an optimistic evaluation of the error budget because of an underestimation of the impact of the secular variations of the even zonal harmonics of the geopotential. More realistic evaluations point towards a 15-45% error at 1-3sigma level, respectively.