The LAGEOS satellites orbit and Yukawa-like interactions Original Research Article

LAGEOS II general relativity pericenter precession has been analysed in terms of the errors produced by the mismodelling of both the gravitational and non-gravitational perturbations acting on the satellite orbit. The accuracy in the pericenter determination may be considered as an upper-bound value for the estimate of the strength α of a possible new-long-range-interaction described by a Yukawa-like potential. In the present work we have focused on the constraints in α that can be obtained with the current best multi-satellites gravity field model EGM96 (α < 2.6 × 10−10) and also with the first promising models from the CHAMP (α < 1.8 × 10−10) and GRACE (α < 1.2 × 10−10) gravimetric missions. These results represent, potentially, an improvement of two or three orders-of-magnitude with respect to the best constraints obtained in the past with Earth–LAGEOS and Lunar–LAGEOS data (|α| < 10−5–10−8). The impact of the non-gravitational perturbations mismodelling in the final error budget has been determined together with the improvements obtainable in the constraint of the strength α with the proposed LARES satellite.