Advances in Astronomy
Volume 2010 (2010), Article ID 735487, 5 pages
doi:10.1155/2010/735487

Copyright © 2010 Lorenzo Iorio. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

We investigate the effect of possible a priori “imprinting” effects of general relativity itself on satellite/spacecraft-based tests of it. We deal with some performed or proposed time-delay ranging experiments in the sun's gravitational field. It turns out that the “imprint” of general relativity on the Astronomical Unit and the solar gravitational constant , not solved for in the so far performed spacecraft-based time-delay tests, induces an a priori bias of the order of in typical solar system ranging experiments aimed to measure the space curvature PPN parameter . It is too small by one order of magnitude to be of concern for the performed Cassini experiment, but it would affect future planned or proposed tests aiming to reach a accuracy in determining .