LISA Pathfinder Space Telescope Ready to Launch

ESA announced the completion of assembly and testing of the experimental LISA Pathfinder telescope. They plan to launch it into the Earth’s orbit from the Kourou cosmodrome, and the system will study gravitational waves - this is, in fact, the first stage of the project to create a space detector of gravitational waves.

Project supervisor Paul Manamara (Paul McNamara) said that the project itself is very complex, but its implementation allows you to open the way for more and more interesting space missions, in addition, the space detector of gravitational waves is able to monitor objects very distant from the Earth. As for the LISA space telescope, its mission is to detect gravitational waves that appear during the interaction of huge objects in deep space.

It is interesting that a similar project was decided at the beginning of 2001. This is a joint mission of NASA and ESA. By design, LISA is a composite system represented by three parts. Each part is equipped with a laser system and a sensor, which allows you to detect the slightest deviations of laser beams that come from other systems. In standby mode, LISA is a regular triangle with a side length of 5 million kilometers. The sides are represented by laser beams. When passing through a system of gravitational waves, the detectors will detect the deviation of the laser beams, which will allow these waves to be detected.



The aim of the project isnot only the detection of gravitational waves, but also the measurement of their polarization, as well as the direction to their source. Thus, in the end, the goal of the project is to build a sky map with an angular resolution of the order of several degrees by studying low-frequency gravitational radiation. If the experiment has been successful for several years, the resolution for sources of high-frequency gravitational waves (with periods of less than 100 seconds) can be improved to several angular minutes.

Unfortunately, in 2011, NASA refused to participate in the project, so the implementation of the idea was postponed. But the ESA decided to create a test apparatus LISA Pathfinder, which will allow to test the technology of detection of gravitational waves. A full-scale LISA system, if it is created, is not earlier than 2030.

LISA Pathfinder - can work, like a full LISA, but the side of the triangle in this case is not 5 million km, but only 38 centimeters. It is planned to send the telescope into orbit next year, in the fall.