Earth albedo and the orbit of Lageos |
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Authors: | David Parry Rubincam Nelson R. Weiss |
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Affiliation: | (1) Geodynamics Branch, Goddard Space Flight Center, Code 621, 20771 Greenbelt, MD, USA;(2) RMS Technologies, 8210 Corporate Drive, Suite 500, 20785 Landover, MD, USA |
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Abstract: | The long-period perturbations in the orbit of Lageos satellite due to the earth's albedo have been found using a new analytical formalism. The earth is assumed to be a sphere whose surface diffusely reflects sunlight according to Lambert's law. Specular reflection is not considered. The formalism is based on spherical harmonics; it produces equations which hold regardless of whether the terminator is seen by the satellite or not. Specializing in the case of a realistic zonal albedo shows that Lageos' orbital semimajor axis changes periodically by only about a centimeter and the eccentricity by two parts in 105. The longitude of the node increases secularly by about 6×10–4 arc sec yr–1. The effect considered here can explain neither the secular decay of 1.1 mm day–1 in the semimajor axis nor the observed along-track variations in acceleration of order 2×10–12 ms–2. |
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