Diurnal and Subdiurnal Terms in Rdan97 Series

In this paper, the series RDAN97 recently published (Roosbeek and Dehant, 1998) is completed by computing the diurnal and subdiurnal nutation terms. The method used is based on computing the torque induced by the external bodies on the rigid earth. The ephemerides used are analytical and based on celestial mechanics considerations. With a truncation level of 0.1 μas, 115 terms in longitude and 78 terms in obliquity have been computed. These terms correspond to the influence of the earth's geopotential coefficients c_2,2 and s_2,2, c_3,m and s_3,m (for the interaction between the earth and the moon and the sun), and c_4,m and s_4,m (for the interaction between the earth and the moon). A comparison with the recent theories REN‐2000 (Souchay and Kinoshita, 1996, 1997) and SMART97 (Bretagnon et al., 1997, 1998) shows that our series is at a very high precision, better than the most recent VLBI campaigns. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.