2024-01-29 07:45:39
The green light has been given to the construction of the three spacecraft of the LISA (Laser Interferometer Space Antenna) project, whose pioneering mission will be to detect and study gravitational waves from space.
The scientific programs committee of the European Space Agency (ESA) has approved the construction of the ships and their scientific instruments. The design is already sufficiently mature and it has been determined that it is already technologically feasible to put it into practice.
This work will begin in January 2025, once a European company has been chosen as the main contractor. Space agencies from the member countries also collaborate with ESA, as well as NASA (US space agency) and an international consortium of scientists.
LISA’s fleet will consist of three identical spacecraft, flying in formation. They will orbit around the Sun following the Earth, forming an equilateral triangle in space. Each side of the triangle will be 2.5 million kilometers long (more than six times the distance between the Earth and the Moon), and the spacecraft will exchange laser beams over this distance.
The launch of the three spacecraft is scheduled for 2035, using an Ariane 6 rocket.
The illustration shows two black holes merging and creating ripples in the fabric of space-time. In the background you can see some galaxies. In the foreground, bright red lines trace the shape of a triangle, which represents the position of LISA’s three spacecraft and the laser beams that will travel between them. (Image: ESA. CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO)
A little over a century ago, Einstein made the revolutionary prediction that when massive objects accelerate, they shake the fabric of space-time, producing tiny ripples or wrinkles known as gravitational waves. Thanks to modern technological advances, for the last few years we have been able to detect these elusive signals. For now, they have been captured from special facilities on the Earth’s surface. With LISA, a step is taken towards a new and fascinating phase, in which gravitational waves will be captured that would be unfeasible to capture from the surface of the Earth.
Using laser beams projected up to distances of several kilometers, ground-based instrumentation can detect gravitational waves from events involving star-sized objects, such as supernova explosions or mergers of hyperdense stars and stellar-mass black holes. Thanks to the enormous distance traveled by the laser signals in LISA, and the magnificent stability of its instrumentation, it will be possible to capture gravitational waves of lower frequencies than those detectable from Earth, allowing the discovery of events on a different scale, going back to the beginning of time, as Nora Lützgendorf, from the scientific team, argues.
LISA will detect, throughout the universe, the ripples in space-time caused by the collision between enormous black holes at the centers of galaxies. This will allow scientists to trace the enigmatic origin of these monstrous objects, up to billions of times more massive than stellar-mass black holes, track how they grow, and figure out the role they play in the evolution of galaxies.
The mission is designed to capture the gravitational “buzz” of the initial moments of our universe’s existence and reveal new data about the first seconds after the Big Bang, the colossal “explosion” with which the universe was born. Additionally, because gravitational waves carry information about the distance of the objects that emit them, LISA will help researchers measure the change in the expansion of the universe with a different type of measuring stick than the techniques used on other space missions, validating thus its results or proposing alternatives if there are divergences. (Source: NCYT from Amazings)
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