A new measurement of the gravitomagnetic field of the Earth is presented. The measurement has been obtained through the careful evaluation of the Lense-Thirring (LT) precession on the combined orbits of three passive geodetic satellites, LAGEOS, LAGEOS II, and LARES, tracked by the Satellite Laser Ranging (SLR) technique. This general relativity precession, also known as frame-dragging, is a manifestation of spacetime curvature generated by mass-currents, a peculiarity of Einstein’s theory of gravitation. The measurement stands out, compared to previous measurements in the same context, for its precision ($\simeq 7.4\times {10}^{-3}$, at a 95% confidence level) and accuracy ($\simeq 16\times {10}^{-3}$), i.e., for a reliable and robust evaluation of the systematic sources of error due to both gravitational and non-gravitational perturbations. To achieve this measurement, we have largely exploited the results of the GRACE (Gravity Recovery And Climate Experiment) mission in order to significantly improve the description of the Earth’s gravitational field, also modeling its dependence on time. In this way, we strongly reduced the systematic errors due to the uncertainty in the knowledge of the Earth even zonal harmonics and, at the same time, avoided a possible bias of the final result and, consequently, of the precision of the measurement, linked to a non-reliable handling of the unmodeled and mismodeled periodic effects.

中文翻译：

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激光跟踪卫星对地球重力磁场的1％测量

提出了地球重力磁场的一种新的测量方法。通过仔细评估三无源大地卫星LAGEOS，LAGEOS II和LARES组合轨道上的Lense-Thirring（LT）进动的仔细评估，获得了测量值，并通过卫星激光测距（SLR）技术进行了跟踪。广义相对论的前移，也称为拖曳框架，是由质量流产生的时空曲率的一种表现，这是爱因斯坦引力理论的特质。与以前在相同背景下进行的测量相比，该测量的精度高（$\simeq 7.4\times {10}^{-3}$，置信水平为95％）和准确性（$\simeq 16\times {10}^{-3}$），即对引力和非引力扰动引起的系统误差源进行可靠，可靠的评估。为了实现这一测量，我们在很大程度上利用了GRACE（重力恢复和气候实验）任务的结果，以便显着改善对地球重力场的描述，还可以模拟其对时间的依赖性。这样，由于地球乃至区域谐波知识的不确定性，我们极大地减少了系统误差，同时避免了最终结果的可能偏差，从而避免了测量精度的影响。对未建模和错误建模的周期性影响的非可靠处理。