Review and critical analysis of mass and moments of inertia of the LAGEOS and LAGEOS II satellites for the LARASE program

The two LAGEOS satellites, currently the best tracked satellites by the stations of the International Laser Ranging Service (ILRS), play a significant role in the fields of space geodesy and geophysics as well as in very precise measurements and constraints in fundamental physics. Specifically, for the measurements of tiny relativistic effects it is mandatory to build accurate models for the dynamics of the satellites, in particular concerning their spin evolution and the determination of their temperature distribution and thermal behavior under different physical conditions. Consequently, an accurate knowledge of both the external and internal structure of the laser-ranged satellites, and of their main dynamic parameters to be used within the orbit models, is of crucial importance. In this work we reconstruct information about the structure, the materials used, and the moments of inertia of the two LAGEOS satellites. The moments of inertia of LAGEOS resulted to be 11.42±0.0311.42±0.03 kg m2 for the cylindrical symmetry axis and 10.96±0.0310.96±0.03 kg m2 for the other two main axes. The analogous quantities for LAGEOS II are 11.45±0.0311.45±0.03 kg m2 and 11.00±0.0311.00±0.03 kg m2. We also built a 3D-CAD model of the satellites structure which is useful for finite element-based analysis. We tried to solve contradictions and overcome several misunderstanding present in the historical literature of the older LAGEOS, carefully reanalyzing the earlier technical papers. To test the results we obtained, we used our moments of inertia to compute the spin evolution of the two satellites obtaining a good agreement between measured and estimated values for the spin direction and the rotational period. We believe we now have accurate knowledge of the mass, moments of inertia, and composition of both LAGEOS satellites.