PARIS: The satellite is expected to operate for about a year, and is equipped with just a single instrument created to detect and capture gravitational waves.
The European Space Agency’s LISA Pathfinder spacecraft is due to blast off tomorrow from Kourou, French Guiana, on its mission to “test the technology needed to develop future space-borne gravitational wave detectors”.
There’s just one problem: the signatures of gravitational waves are extremely faint.
Such an event should cause a minute distortion in the fabric of space, and it is predicted that these tiny changes should be detectable.
It has been a century since Einstein presented his theory of general relativity but it is still helping us unveil some of the deepest mysteries of the universe.
However, LISA Pathfinder, which is set to launch on December 2, will test the concept of gravitational wave detection in space. Gravitational wave detectors known as laser interferometers, which already exist on Earth, therefore work by splitting a laser beam in two perpendicular directions and sending them down long vacuum tubes.
The LISA Pathfinder mission, which costs some $424 million, will send the spacecraft about 932,000 miles toward the sun over about six weeks, where it will assume an orbit that keeps it right between the sun and Earth.
The LISA Pathfinder launch coincides nearly perfectly with the 100th anniversary of the publication of Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity – published on 2 December 1915.
A laser interferometer will measure the position and orientation of the two test masses relative to the spacecraft and to each other with a precision of approximately 10 picometers (one hundred millionth of a millimeter). Unfortunately, the Nobel Prize-worthy discovery was nothing more than space dust.
After a slightly rocky start – the launch was meant to be on Tuesday, the European Space Agency (ESA) reported a smooth take off earlier today.
But such is the interest in gravitational waves that Esa member states have persisted with Pathfinder, and look certain to make the formal call for its follow-on mission at the end of next year.
Once it has reached its designated orbit in March, it will then spend the next six months scanning the universe, but before it does that, the two cubes will be released from the locking mechanisms that hold them during launch and cruise before being completely detached from the parent craft in final orbit.
