Abstract
THE Earth's gravitational potential U at an exterior point distant r from the Earth's centre, and having geocentric latitude ϕ, may be written in a series of spherical harmonics as: where G is the gravitational constant, M the mass of the Earth, and R the Earth's equatorial radius. Pn(sin ϕ) is the Legendre polynomial of degree n and argument sin ϕ, and the Jn are constant coefficients. Equation (1) does not take into account the small variation of U with longitude, and represents an average over all longitudes.
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KING-HELE, D., COOK, G. & REES, J. Earth's Gravitational Potential: Evaluation of Even Zonal Harmonics from the 2nd to the 12th. Nature 197, 785 (1963). https://doi.org/10.1038/197785a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/197785a0
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