ESA LISA Mission

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NASA Provides Laser for LISA Mission

Sep 14, 2021
Finding the biggest collisions in the universe takes time, patience, and super steady lasers.

In May, NASA specialists working with industry partners delivered the first prototype laser for the European Space Agency-led Laser Interferometer Space Antenna, or LISA, mission. This unique laser instrument is designed to detect the telltale ripples in gravitational fields caused by the mergers of neutron stars, black holes, and supermassive black holes in space.

Anthony Yu at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, leads the laser transmitter development for LISA.

“We’re developing a highly stable and robust laser for the LISA observatory,” Yu said. “We've leveraged lessons learned from previous missions and the latest technologies in photonics packaging and reliability engineering. Now, to meet the challenging LISA requirements, NASA has developed a system that produces a laser transmitter by using a low-power laser enhanced by a fiber-optic amplifier."

The team is building upon the laser technology used in NASA’s Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment, or GRACE, mission. “We developed a more compact version as a master oscillator,” Yu said. “It has much smaller size, weight, and power consumption to allow for a fully redundant master oscillator for long-duration lifetime requirements.”

The LISA laser prototype is a 2-watt laser operating in the near-infrared part of the spectrum. “Our laser is about 400 times more powerful than the typical laser pointer that puts out about 5 milliwatts or less,” Yu said. “The laser module size, not including the electronics, is about half the volume of a typical shoe box.”

The Swiss Center for Electronics and Microtechnology (CSEM), headquartered in Neuchâtel, Switzerland, confirmed receipt of the lasers and will begin testing them for stability.

LISA will consist of three spacecraft following Earth in its orbit around the Sun and flying in a precision formation, with 1.5 million miles (2.5 million kilometers) separating each one. Each spacecraft will continuously point two lasers at its counterparts. The laser receiver must be sensitive to a few hundreds of picowatts of signal strength, as the laser beam will spread to about 12 miles (20 kilometers) by the time it reaches its target spacecraft. A time-code signal embedded in the beams allows LISA to measure the slightest interference in these transmissions.

Ripples in the fabric of space-time as small as a picometer – 50 times smaller than a hydrogen atom – will produce a detectable change in the distances between the spacecraft. Measuring these changes will give scientists the general scale of what collided to produce these ripples and an idea of where in the sky to aim other observatories looking for secondary effects.

 

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In 2017, LISA was selected as one of ESA’s large class missions in the Cosmic Vision Programme. It has now passed through Phase A in the mission lifetime cycle, where the missions’ feasibility was assessed, as well as where the first designs and technologies were developed.

Phase A ended with a comprehensive ‘Mission Formulation Review’. The review team, consisting of experts from ESA, NASA, the scientific community and industry, identified no showstoppers and confirmed that LISA has successfully reached a maturity sufficient to proceed to the next stage of development.

After passing the review, LISA now enters Phase B1, which is where the mission will be refined, all necessary technology will be developed, final designs will be chosen, and international agreements will be set.

LISA is expected to launch in the mid-2030s, and will work together with ESA’s upcoming Athena mission that will observe the X-ray emission from the clashes of black holes.

LISA mission moves to final design phase

ESA’s Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA) passed an important review that marks the mission as feasible for final technology development and design before adoption.

www.esa.int

 

[FighterJock]

In 2017, LISA was selected as one of ESA’s large class missions in the Cosmic Vision Programme. It has now passed through Phase A in the mission lifetime cycle, where the missions’ feasibility was assessed, as well as where the first designs and technologies were developed.

Phase A ended with a comprehensive ‘Mission Formulation Review’. The review team, consisting of experts from ESA, NASA, the scientific community and industry, identified no showstoppers and confirmed that LISA has successfully reached a maturity sufficient to proceed to the next stage of development.

After passing the review, LISA now enters Phase B1, which is where the mission will be refined, all necessary technology will be developed, final designs will be chosen, and international agreements will be set.

LISA is expected to launch in the mid-2030s, and will work together with ESA’s upcoming Athena mission that will observe the X-ray emission from the clashes of black holes.

LISA mission moves to final design phase

ESA’s Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA) passed an important review that marks the mission as feasible for final technology development and design before adoption.

www.esa.int

Good news for LISA, I have long had an interest Gravitational Waves ever since I first started my interest in the Astronomy/Cosmology. I will look forward to the launch in 2030 but it is a long time to wait. In saying that I have the LIGO/VIRGO detectors webpage bookmarked in my web browser.

 

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Sep 2, 2022

CONTRACT RELEASE C22-010 (Goddard)

NASA Awards LISA Mission Laser Instrument Contract

NASA has selected Ball Aerospace & Technology Corp. of Boulder, Colorado, to provide the Laser Prestabilizaton System (LPS) for the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA) laser assembly.

The total value of the cost-plus-fixed-fee contract is $11,906,675, and the period of performance is from Sept. 1, 2022, through April 1, 2025. The work will be performed at the contractor’s facility in Boulder.

The LISA mission is a collaboration of ESA (the European Space Agency), NASA, and an international consortium of scientists. The LISA mission is planned to launch in the 2035 timeframe. The LISA Telescope and laser systems are being developed at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.

NASA is in the technology development and study phase of the mission and will be contributing hardware as part of an agreement with ESA. LISA consists of three spacecraft arranged in a triangle and separated by millions of miles, trailing tens of millions of miles, more than one hundred times the distance to the Moon, behind Earth as it orbits the Sun. These three spacecraft will relay continuous laser beams back and forth to detect gravitational wave signatures that come from distortions of spacetime. This contract pertains to the LPS used for frequency stabilizing the laser.

For more information about the LISA mission, visit: https://lisa.nasa.gov/

NASA Awards LISA Mission Laser Instrument Contract

NASA has selected Ball Aerospace & Technology Corp. of Boulder, Colorado, to provide the Laser Prestabilizaton System (LPS) for the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA) laser assembly.

www.nasa.gov

 

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Officially adopted by ESA now. Set to launch in 2035 on Ariane 6.

Today, ESA’s Science Programme Committee approved the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA) mission, the first scientific endeavour to detect and study gravitational waves from space.

Capturing the ripples of spacetime: LISA gets go-ahead

Today, ESA’s Science Programme Committee approved the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA) mission, the first scientific endeavour to detect and study gravitational waves from space.

www.esa.int

 

[FighterJock]

A launch date of 2035 on Ariane 6? That certainly is a long time to wait for LISA Flyaway, at least ESA have now given the go ahead.

 

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A launch date of 2035 on Ariane 6? That certainly is a long time to wait for LISA Flyaway, at least ESA have now given the go ahead.

I imagine it’s the technology involved and what it needs to do.

 

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NASA Reveals Prototype Telescope for Gravitational Wave Observatory [Oct 22]

NASA has revealed the first look at a full-scale prototype for six telescopes that will enable, in the next decade, the space-based detection of gravitational waves — ripples in space-time caused by merging black holes and other cosmic sources.

The LISA (Laser Interferometer Space Antenna) mission is led by ESA (European Space Agency) in partnership with NASA to detect gravitational waves by using lasers to measure precise distances — down to picometers, or trillionths of a meter — between a trio of spacecraft distributed in a vast configuration larger than the Sun. Each side of the triangular array will measure nearly 1.6 million miles, or 2.5 million kilometers.

“Twin telescopes aboard each spacecraft will both transmit and receive infrared laser beams to track their companions, and NASA is supplying all six of them to the LISA mission,” said Ryan DeRosa, a researcher at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. “The prototype, called the Engineering Development Unit Telescope, will guide us as we work toward building the flight hardware.”

The Engineering Development Unit Telescope, which was manufactured and assembled by L3Harris Technologies in Rochester, New York, arrived at Goddard in May. The primary mirror is coated in gold to better reflect the infrared lasers and to reduce heat loss from a surface exposed to cold space since the telescope will operate best when close to room temperature.

The prototype is made entirely from an amber-colored glass-ceramic called Zerodur, manufactured by Schott in Mainz, Germany. The material is widely used for telescope mirrors and other applications requiring high precision because its shape changes very little over a wide range of temperatures.

The LISA mission is slated to launch in the mid-2030s.

Higher Res photos here

 

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Why We Must Build a Massive Gravitational Wave Telescope In Space - The LISA Mission

Nov 22, 2024
The Laser Interferometer Space Antenna - LISA is a set of 3 spacecraft which will work together to make a massive gravitational wave telescope in deep space, with arms millions of kilometers long it will be able to detect events at much lower frequencies, meaning we can detect black hole mergers months ahead of the event, and entirely new phenomena involving supermassive black holes.

The LISA spacecraft at there core use free flying gold cubes as reference masses for the telescope arms, and managing these so that they remain in free fall is a core capability that was so critical to the success of the mission that they launched the LISA Pathfinder mission to test the technologies needed for the final mission to prove that the system would maintain the levels of control required for good science.

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3mXNt-BDUss