Data efficiency for the satellite LARES

LARES, together with other laser ranged satellites and other space geodesy techniques are used by the scientific community to monitor global environmental changes including melting of the polar ice caps. The accuracy reached today with these sophisticated techniques is very high since they allow to monitor for instance the Earth rotation axis shifts with accuracies of a few millimeters or better. In the case of laser ranging, this accuracy depends on many factors, but the main one is the number of the data collected by the tracking network daily. This raw data set is reduced to a compressed set of laser returns, called normal points — NPs, for analysis. The paper is devoted to describing the quantity and quality of the satellite laser ranging (SLR) data acquired from the satellite LARES with respect to other similar satellites. This analysis is instrumental to understand the accuracy required in the field of Earth science and in particular of global environmental monitoring.