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)

BibTeX

@article{896d9200e05844a6a4a075bb88ad3669,
title = "Impact of non-tidal station loading in LLR",
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%.",
keywords = "Lunar laser ranging, Non-tidal loading, Station displacements",
author = "Singh, {Vishwa Vijay} and Liliane Biskupek and J{\"u}rgen M{\"u}ller and Mingyue Zhang",
note = "Funding Information: Current LLR data are collected, archived, and distributed under the auspices of the International Laser Ranging Service (ILRS) ( Pearlman et al., 2019 ). We acknowledge with thanks that 50 years of processed LLR data has been obtained under the efforts of the personnel at the Observatoire de la C{\^o}te d'Azur in France, the LURE Observatory in Maui, Hawaii, the McDonald Observatory in Texas, the Apache Point Observatory in New Mexico, the Matera Laser Ranging observatory in Italy, and the Wettzell Laser Ranging System in Germany. This research was funded by the German Aerospace Center's (DLR) Institute for Satellite Geodesy and Inertial Sensing, and Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) under Germany{\textquoteright}s Excellence Strategy EXC 2123 QuantumFrontiers, Project-ID 390837967. Further financial supports were from the Strategic Priority Research Program of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (grant nos. XDB23030100 and XDA15017700) and the National Natural Science Foundation of China (project no. 41704013). We would additionally like to thank Franz Hofmann for his contributions to LUNAR, Jean-Paul Boy (University of Strasbourg, France) for providing additional data for this study, Johannes B{\~A}¶hm (Technical University of Vienna, Austria), Leonid Petrov (NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, USA) for discussions regarding non-tidal loadings, and Thomas Murphy (University of California, San Diego) for providing us with the APOLLO station coordinates. ",
year = "2021",
month = jun,
day = "15",
doi = "10.48550/arXiv.2012.05831",
language = "English",
volume = "67",
pages = "3925--3941",
journal = "Advances in space research",
issn = "0273-1177",
publisher = "Elsevier Ltd.",
number = "12",
}