PT4 - Precision Tests of Special Relativity |
Speaker_ |
Müller, Jürgen |
Talk _ |
Lunar Laser Ranging: a Space Geodetic Technique to Test Relativity |
Abstract _ |
Being one of the first space geodetic techniques, lunar laser ranging (LLR) has routinely provided observations for more than 35 years. The main benefit of this technique is, e.g., to determine many parameters of the Earth-Moon dynamics (e.g. orbit and rotation of the Moon, a selenocentric reference frame or the secular increase of the Earth-Moon distance: 3.8 cm/year) and to test metric theories of gravity. LLR data analysis determines gravitational physics quantities such as the equivalence principle, any time variation of the gravitational constant, and several metric parameters. The gravitational physics parameters cause different spectral perturbations of the lunar orbit, which can be used to separate the various relativistic and Newtonian effects with high accuracy. We give an overview of the recent status of our LLR analysis procedure and describe the sensitivity of the solution parameters to the capabilities of LLR. |