GALILEO with high eccentricity and equipped by accelerometers: A tool for GR experiments: GNSS scientific applications

In the last years three ingredients have enlarged the spectrum of scientific applications based on space techniques: the big number of satellites devoted to Space Geodesy and Earth Observation, the tremendous improvement of the Earth gravity field models due to CHAMP, GRACE and GOCE missions and the application of the Gravity Field Free technique (GFF). The last ingredient was applied for the first time to measure the Lense Thirring gravitomagnetic field (L-T). Essentially a linear combination of "n" orbital parameters of LAGEOS I & II satellites [1] was performed in order to cancel the contribution of the first (n-1) even zonals of the gravity field. The chance to put aboard GALILEO accelerometers (AoG) and the “unhappy” injection of two satellites on wrong highly eccentric orbits can make the direct involvement of GNSS satellites in scientific investigations more and more essential. We will investigate how all these ingredients can improve the quality of General Relativistic tests by using Space Geodesy satellites.