Abstract
LARES-2 is a new geodetic satellite designed for high-accuracy satellite laser ranging. The orbit altitude of LARES-2 is similar to that of LAGEOS-1, whereas the inclination angle of 70° complements the LAGEOS-1 inclination of 110°; hence, both satellites form the butterfly configuration for the verification of the Lense–Thirring effect. Although the major objective of LARES-2 is testing general relativity, LARES-2 substantially contributes to geodesy in terms of the realization of terrestrial reference frames, recovery of the geocenter motion, pole coordinates, length-of-day, and low-degree gravity field coefficients. We analyze the first 1.5 years of LARES-2 data and test different empirical orbit models for LARES-2 with and without co-estimating low-degree gravity field coefficients to find the best combination strategy with LAGEOS satellites. We found that LARES-2 orbit determination is more accurate than that of LAGEOS-1/2 due to a different satellite construction consisting of a solid sphere with no inner structure. Neither the correction for D 0 nor the empirical once-per-revolution along-track accelerations S C / S S have to be estimated for LARES-2 when co-estimating gravity field coefficients. The only empirical parameter needed for LARES-2 is the constant along-track acceleration S 0 to compensate for the Yarkovsky–Schach effect. On the contrary, for LAGEOS-1/2, the non-gravitational perturbations affect C 30 and Z geocenter estimates when once-per-revolution parameters are not estimated. LARES-2 does not face this issue. LARES-2 improves the formal errors of the Z geocenter component by up to 59% and C 20 by up to 40% compared to the combined LAGEOS-1/2 solutions and provides C 30 estimates unaffected by thermal orbit modeling issues.