The LISA Pathfinder Mission
By G. Racca, P. Mcnamara. 2010
158 citations recorded by the source corpus.
LISA Pathfinder (LPF), the second of the European Space Agency's Small Missions for Advanced Research in Technology (SMART), is a dedicated technology validation mission for future spaceborne gravitational wave detectors, such as the proposed eLISA mission. LISA Pathfinder, and its scientific payload - the LISA Technology Package - will test, in flight, the critical technologies required for low frequency gravitational wave detection: it will put two test masses in a near-perfect gravitational free-fall and control and measure their motion with unprecedented accuracy. This is achieved through technology comprising inertial sensors, high precision laser metrology, drag-free control and an ultra-precise micro-Newton propulsion system. LISA Pathfinder is due to be launched in mid-2015, with first results on the performance of the system being available 6 months thereafter. The paper introduces the LISA Pathfinder mission, followed by an explanation of the physical principles of measurement concept and associated hardware. We then provide a detailed discussion of the LISA Technology Package, including both the inertial sensor and interferometric readout. As we approach the launch of the LISA Pathfinder, the focus of the development is shifting towards the science operations and data analysis - this is described in the final section of the paper
Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Oceanography
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/9852d31015379bb9125a2c98930e3756e00b3304
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In Astronomy and Astrophysics
In Oceanography
Citations in the corpus
- Electric propulsion for satellites and spacecraft: established technologies and novel approaches (2016, methodology): “An example of application is the LISA Pathfinder mission for gravitational wave detection for which the spacecraft uses colloid thrusters for drag-free control [13].”