A Test of General Relativity Using the LARES and LAGEOS Satellites and a GRACE Earth's Gravity Model

Understand

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's gravity field model GGM05S produced by the space geodesy mission GRACE.
• We measure $\mu = (0.994 \pm 0.002) \pm 0.05$, where $\mu$ 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 the estimated systematic error mainly due to the uncertainties in the Earth's gravity model GGM05S.
• Our result is in agreement with the prediction of General Relativity.