LISA Pathfinder: mission and status

Abstract

LISA Pathfinder, the second of the European Space Agency's Small Missions for Advanced Research in Technology (SMART), is a dedicated technology demonstrator for the joint ESA/NASA Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA) mission. The technologies required for LISA are many and extremely challenging. This coupled with the fact that some flight hardware cannot be fully tested on ground due to Earth-induced noise led to the implementation of the LISA Pathfinder mission to test the critical LISA technologies in a flight environment. LISA Pathfinder essentially mimics one arm of the LISA constellation by shrinking the 5 million kilometre armlength down to a few tens of centimetres, giving up the sensitivity to gravitational waves, but keeping the measurement technology: the distance between the two test masses is measured using a laser interferometric technique similar to one aspect of the LISA interferometry system. The scientific objective of the LISA Pathfinder mission consists then of the first in-flight test of low frequency gravitational wave detection metrology. LISA Pathfinder is due to be launched in 2013 on-board a dedicated small launch vehicle (VEGA). After a series of apogee raising manoeuvres using an expendable propulsion module, LISA Pathfinder will enter a transfer orbit towards the first Sun-Earth Lagrange point (L1). After separation from the propulsion module, the LPF spacecraft will be stabilized using the micro-Newton thrusters, entering a 500 000 km by 800 000 km Lissajous orbit around L1. Science results will be available approximately 2 months after launch.

Capacitive sensing of test mass motion with nanometer precision over millimeter-wide sensing gaps for space-borne gravitational reference sensors

“…LISA Pathfinder [1,2,8,9] (LPF) is an European Space Agency mission dedicated to the demonstration of free-fall of a TM to the level required for the implementation of the future space-borne gravitational wave (GW) observatory, LISA [3] (Laser Interferometer Space Antenna). Moving to space is advantageous for a GW observatory as there is no seismic gravitational noise that limits the low frequency sensitivity of the ground based GW observatories.…”

Mechanisation of precision placement and catalysis bonding of optical components

“…A recent example has been the Optical Bench Interferometer for the European Space Agency LISA Pathfinder mission [1,2] for which novel alignment and bonding techniques were developed and used to construct the flight hardware.…”

Low-frequency noise characterization of a magnetic field monitoring system using an anisotropic magnetoresistance

“…To that end, magnetometers are aimed at reconstructing an accurate map of the magnetic field and gradient in the region occupied by the TM. The point of the magnetic sensing in eLISA has obviously been addressed first in its technology demonstrator called LISA Pathfinder [4]. As a consequence, the selection criteria to identify the applicable magnetometer technology is performed in view of the previous experience with the design of the LISA Pathfinder magnetic subsystem [5], in which the selected scheme was a set of four tri-axial fluxgate magnetometers.…”