Article snapshot taken from Wikipedia with creative commons attribution-sharealike license.
Give it a read and then ask your questions in the chat.
We can research this topic together.
Etalon-1 and Etalon-2 are geodetic satellites. They are designed to determine, with high accuracy, terrestrial reference frame and Earth rotation parameters, to improve the gravity field, and to improve the gravitational constant. Each satellite is a high-density passive laser reflector in a very stable medium Earth orbit (MEO).