Abstract
THE orbit of a satellite, moving in the Earth's gravitational field, is perturbed by the various spherical harmonic terms which appear in the general expression for the gravitational potential. The coefficients of the normalized harmonics of degree l and order m are usually denoted by Cl,m and Sl,m and values for some arbitrary set of the Cl,m and Sl,m can be obtained by observing satellite perturbations. Gaposchkin and Lambeck1, for example, have given a set of all pairs up to (l, m) = (16, 16), together with fourteen additional pairs which they obtained from orbits in states of near resonance. The effect of the general (l, m) harmonic consists2 of a double sum—on p and q—of perturbations proportional to sin Φlmpq and cos Φlmpq where Open image in new window here Ω, ω and M are the standard elliptic elements, v is sidereal angle and l, m, p, q are integers.
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