Abstract
In parallel and in close interaction with the progress of information gathering and our understanding of the physical processes in the solar system, the recent years have witnessed an impressive development of precise measurements in space. This has been made possible by the new space technologies, in particular by dedicated scientific space missions and radio communications. The extreme accuracies obtained in measuring distances, time intervals and relative velocities not only have led to new and deeper insights in the structure of planetary bodies, but have also affected our conception of space-time. It is appropriate, therefore, to review in this last chapter the mathematical and the experimental techniques used in these experiments and to survey some of their most interesting results. We do not mention here the large body of space plasma experiments, which have provided extensive and accurate information about particle distributions and electromagnetic fields in the magnetosphere and interplanetary space.
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Further Readings
There are many good textbooks on data analysis, a marginal topic in this book; we quote only one which includes an introduction to Kaiman filtering: A.H. Jazwinski, Stochastic Processes and Filtering Theory, Academic Press (1970).
On LAGEOS, see the special issue of the J. Geophys. Res. of September 30, 1985; the result about the change in J2 is described in C.F. Yoder et al., Nature, 303, 757 (1983).
The relativistic experiments are described in detail in the book by Will (see Ch. 17); for a more recent update, see the contribution by C.M. Will, Experimental Gravitation from Newton’s Principia to Einstein’s General Relativity, in the volume Three Hundred Years of Gravitation (S.W. Hawking and W. Israel, eds.), Cambridge University Press (1987).
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© 1990 Kluwer Academic Publishers
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Bertotti, B., Farinella, P. (1990). Precise Measurements in Space. In: Physics of the Earth and the Solar System. Geophysics and Astrophysics Monographs, vol 31. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-1916-7_20
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-1916-7_20
Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht
Print ISBN: 978-94-010-7355-4
Online ISBN: 978-94-009-1916-7
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