Drift of the Earth’s Principal Axes of Inertia from GRACE and Satellite Laser Ranging Data

The location of the Earth’s principal axes of inertia is a foundation for all the theories and solutions of its rotation, and thus has a broad effect on many fields, including astronomy, geodesy, and satellite-based positioning and navigation systems. That location is determined by the second-degree Stokes coefficients of the geopotential. Accurate solutions for those coefficients were limited to the stationary case for many years, but the situation improved with the accomplishment of Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE), and nowadays several solutions for the time-varying geopotential have been derived based on gravity and satellite laser ranging data, with time resolutions reaching one month or one week. Although those solutions are already accurate enough to compute the evolution of the Earth’s axes of inertia along more than a decade, such an analysis has never been performed. In this paper, we present the first analysis of this problem, taking advantage of previous analytical derivations to simplify the computations and the estimation of the uncertainty of solutions. The results are rather striking, since the axes of inertia do not move around some mean position fixed to a given terrestrial reference frame in this period, but drift away from their initial location in a slow but clear and not negligible manner.