Impact of non-tidal station loading in LLR

authored by
Vishwa Vijay Singh, Liliane Biskupek, Jürgen Müller, Mingyue Zhang
Abstract

Lunar Laser Ranging (LLR) measures the distance between observatories on Earth and retro-reflectors on Moon since 1970. In this paper, we study the effect of non-tidal station loading (NTSL) in the analysis of LLR data. We add the non-tidal loading effect provided by three data centres: the German Research Centre for Geosciences (GFZ), the International Mass Loading Service (IMLS) and EOST loading service of University of Strasbourg in France, as observation level corrections of the LLR observatories in our analysis. This effect causes deformations of the Earth surface up to the centimetre level. Its addition in the Institute of Geodesy (IfE) LLR model, it leads to a change in the uncertainties (3-σ values) of the station coordinates resulting in a 0.60% improvement, an improvement in the post-fit LLR residuals of up to 9%, and a decrease in the power of the annual signal in the LLR post-fit residuals of up to 57%.

Organisation(s)
Institute of Geodesy
QuantumFrontiers
External Organisation(s)
DLR-Institute for Satellite Geodesy and Inertial Sensing
German Aerospace Center (DLR)
College of Earth and Planetary Sciences, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences
University of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (UCAS)
Type
Article
Journal
Advances in space research
Volume
67
Pages
3925-3941
No. of pages
17
ISSN
0273-1177
Publication date
15.06.2021
Publication status
Published
Peer reviewed
Yes
ASJC Scopus subject areas
Aerospace Engineering, Astronomy and Astrophysics, Geophysics, Atmospheric Science, Space and Planetary Science, Earth and Planetary Sciences(all)
Electronic version(s)
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2012.05831 (Access: Open)
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.asr.2021.03.018 (Access: Open)