Research on the recovery of the lunar gravity from simulant orbit perturbation data

Abstract

Research on the lunar gravity field helps us to understand its physical characteristics and its inner structure and discern its origin and evolvement. Detecting the lunar gravity field helps to improve the precision of calculating geodetic and geodynamic constant, refining lunar coordinate system, and understanding the evolving history and the geologic structure of the moon. The determining of the lunar gravity field provides us with useful data for studying the lunar geoid and gravity anomaly. The lunar gravity field restricts the motion of all the other objects. Detectors changing its orbit from the earth orbit into the moon orbit and landing are mainly influenced by the lunar gravity. Accurate lunar gravity field model is the prerequisite of landing accurately and one of the key factors to succeed in the plan of manned landing on the moon.