The first round result from the TianQin-1 satellite

By Jun Luo, Yanzheng Bai, L. Cai, Bin Cao, Wei-Ming Chen, Yu Chen, De-Cong Cheng, Yanwei Ding, Huizong Duan, Xingyu Gou and 47 more. Classical and quantum gravity, 2020

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The TianQin-1 satellite (TQ-1), which is the first technology demonstration satellite for the TianQin project, was launched on 20 December 2019. The first round of experiment had been carried out from 21 December 2019 until 1 April 2020. The residual acceleration of the satellite is found to be about 1 × 10−10 m/s2/Hz1/2 at 0.1 Hz and about 5 × 10−11 m/s2/Hz1/2 at 0.05 Hz, measured by an inertial sensor with a sensitivity of 5 × 10−12 m/s2/Hz1/2 at 0.1 Hz. The micro-Newton thrusters has demonstrated a thrust resolution of 0.1  μN and a thrust noise of 0.3  μN/Hz1/2 at 0.1 Hz. The residual noise of the satellite with drag-free control is 3 × 10−9 m/s2/Hz1/2 at 0.1 Hz. The noise level of the optical readout system is about 30 pm/Hz1/2 at 0.1 Hz. The temperature stability at temperature monitoring position is controlled to be about ±3 mK per orbit, and the mismatch between the center-of-mass of the satellite and that of the test mass is measured with a precision of better than 0.1 mm.

Subfields: Aerospace Engineering, Astronomy and Astrophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/3e0c9671b6885fa20a7c981d25d5d5e867710a8e