X iv : g r - qc / 0 30 40 11 v 9 5 F eb 2 00 4 The impact of the new Earth gravity mod - els on the measurement of the Lense – Thirring effect

We examine how the new forthcoming Earth gravity models from the CHAMP and, especially, GRACE missions could improve the measurement of the general relativistic Lense–Thirring effect according to the various kinds of observables which could be adopted. In a very preliminary way, we use the first recently released EIGEN2 CHAMP– only and GGM01C GRACE–based Earth gravity models in order to assess the impact of the mismodelling in the even zonal harmonic coefficients of geopotential which represents one of the major sources of systematic errors in this kind of measurement. However, discretion is advised on evaluating the reliability of these results because the Earth gravity models used here, especially EIGEN2, are still very preliminary and more extensive calibration tests must be performed. According to the GGM01C model, the systematic error due to the unmodelled even zonal harmonics of geopotential amounts to 2% for the combination of the nodes of LAGEOS and LAGEOS II and the perigee of LAGEOS II used up to now by Ciufolini and coworkers in the currently performed LAGEOS-LAGEOS II Lense-Thirring experiment, and to 14% for a combination explicitly presented here which involves the nodes only of LAGEOS and LAGEOS II.