Building The Largest Telescope Ever - In Space! - Europe's Groundbreaking LISA Mission
12,761The 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.
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