The three Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA) spacecraft are going to be placed in a triangular formation in an Earth-trailing or Earth-leading orbit. They will be launched together on a single rocket and transferred to that science orbit using Solar Electric Propulsion. Since the transfer $Δv$ depends on the chosen science orbit, both transfer and science orbit have been optimised together. For a thrust level of 90 mN, an allocation of 1092 m/s per spacecraft is sufficient for an all-year launch in 2034. For every launch month a dedicated science orbit is designed with a corner angle variation of close to $60^\circ \pm 1.0^\circ$ and an arm length rate of maximum 10 m/s. Moreover, a detailed navigation analysis of the science orbit insertion and the impact on insertion errors on the constellation stability has been conducted. The analysis shows that Range/Doppler measurements together with a series of correction manoeuvres at the beginning of the science orbit phase can reduce insertion dispersions to a level where corner angle variations remain at about $60^\circ \pm 1.1^\circ$ at $99\%$ C.L.. However, the situation can become significantly worse if the self-gravity accelerations acting during the science orbit phase are not sufficiently characterised prior to science orbit insertion.
Design of the magnetic diagnostics unit onboard LISA Pathfinder
LISA（Laser Interferometer Space Antenna）是欧空局和美国宇航局（NASA）的一项联合任务，旨在成为第一个星载引力波观测站。由于LISA将面临的高度复杂性和技术挑战，欧空局决定发射一个技术演示器，LISA探路者。LISA Pathfinder的有效载荷是所谓的LISA技术包，将是迄今为止飞行的最高灵敏度的测地探测器。LISA技术包设计用于测量标称自由降落（测地线运动）中两个试验质量之间的相对加速度。影响有效载荷的磁、热和辐射干扰由诊断子系统监测和处理。诊断子系统由几个模块组成，其中之一是磁诊断单元。其主要功能是评估由于磁效应引起的试验质量之间的差分加速度噪声。为此，它必须确定测试质量的磁特性，即它们的剩磁和磁化率。在本文中，我们将展示如何实现所需的精度。
The success of LISA Pathfinder in demonstrating the LISA drag-free requirement paved the road of using space missions for detecting low-frequency and middle-frequency GWs. The new LISA GW mission proposes to use arm length of 2.5 Gm (1 Gm = 106 km). The TAIJI GW mission proposes to use arm length of 3 Gm. In order to attain the requisite sensitivity, laser frequency noise must be suppressed to below the secondary noises such as the optical path noise, acceleration noise etc. In previous papers, we have performed the numerical simulation of the time delay interferometry (TDI) for original LISA,…
The LISA mission is an international collaboration between ESA, its member states, and NASA, for the detection of gravitational waves from space. It was adopted in January 2024 and is scheduled for launch in the mid-2030's. It will be a constellation of three identical spacecraft forming a near-equilateral triangle in an heliocentric orbit, transferring laser beams over $2.5 \cdot 10^6$ km long arms. Laser interferometry is used to track separations between test masses, thus measuring spacetime strain variations as a function of time. LISA Science Objectives tackle many open questions in astro…
The science objectives of the LISA mission have been defined under the implicit assumption of a 4 yr continuous data stream. Based on the performance of LISA Pathfinder, it is now expected that LISA will have a duty cycle of $\approx 0.75$, which would reduce the effective span of usable data to 3 yr. This paper reports the results of a study by the LISA Science Group, which was charged with assessing the additional science return of increasing the mission lifetime. We explore various observational scenarios to assess the impact of mission duration on the main science objectives of the mission…
What Fraction of Extreme Mass Ratio Inspirals That Merge After the LISA Mission Ends Are Detectable?
Oregon State University（俄勒冈州立大学）；Universities Space Research Association（大学空间研究协会）；NASA Marshall Space Flight Center（美国国家航空航天局马歇尔太空飞行中心）；California Institute of Technology（加州理工学院）；University of Southampton（南安普顿大学）
Building on the great success of the LISA Pathfinder mission, the outlines of a new LISA mission design were laid out at the $11^{\rm th}$ International LISA Symposium in Zurich. The revised design calls for three identical spacecraft forming an equilateral triangle with 2.5 million kilometer sides, and two laser links per side delivering full polarization sensitivity. With the demonstrated Pathfinder performance for the disturbance reduction system, and a well studied design for the laser metrology, it is anticipated that the new mission will have a sensitivity very close to the original LISA…
In previous work [1], three TAIJI orbital deployments have been proposed to compose alternative LISA-TAIJI networks, TAIJIm (leading the Earth by $20^\circ$ and $-60^\circ$ inclined with respect to ecliptic plane), TAIJIp (leading the Earth by $20^\circ$ and $+60^\circ$ inclined), TAIJIc (colocated and coplanar with LISA) with respect to the LISA mission (trailing the Earth by $20^\circ$ and $+60^\circ$ inclined). And the LISA-TAIJIm network has been identified as the most capable configuration for massive black hole binary observation. In this work, we examine the performance of three network…
We anticipate noise from the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA) will exhibit nonstationarities throughout the duration of its mission due to factors such as antenna repointing, cyclostationarities from spacecraft motion, and glitches as highlighted by LISA Pathfinder. In this paper, we use a surrogate data approach to test the stationarity of a time series which does not rely on the Gaussianity assumption. The main goal is to identify noise nonstationarities in the future LISA mission. This will be necessary for determining how often the LISA noise power spectral density (PSD) will need…
The Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA) is slated for launch in the early 2030s. A main target of the mission is massive black hole binaries that have an expected detection rate of $\sim20$ yr$^{-1}$. We present a parameter estimation analysis for a variety of massive black hole binaries. This analysis is performed with a graphics processing unit (GPU) implementation comprising the phenomhm waveform with higher-order harmonic modes and aligned spins; a fast frequency-domain LISA detector response function; and a GPU-native likelihood computation. The computational performance achieved wi…
In this paper we present a data analysis approach applicable to the potential saddle-point fly-by mission extension of LISA Pathfinder (LPF). At the peak of its sensitivity, LPF will sample the gravitational field in our Solar System with a precision of several $\text{fm/s}^2/\sqrt{\text{Hz}}$ at frequencies around $1\,\text{mHz}$. Such an accurate accelerometer will allow us to test alternative theories of gravity that predict deviations from Newtonian dynamics in the non-relativistic limit. As an example, we consider the case of the Tensor-Vector-Scalar theory of gravity and calculate, withi…
The geosynchronous Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (gLISA) is a space-based gravitational wave (GW) mission that, for the past five years, has been under joint study at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Stanford University, the National Institute for Space Research (I.N.P.E., Brazil), and Space Systems Loral. If flown at the same time as the LISA mission, the two arrays will deliver a joint sensitivity that accounts for the best performance of both missions in their respective parts of the mHz band. This simultaneous operation will result in an optimally combined sensitivity curve that is "whi…
The NASA LISA Study Team was tasked to study how NASA might support US scientists to participate and maximize the science return from the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA) mission. LISA is gravitational wave observatory led by ESA with NASA as a junior partner, and is scheduled to launch in 2034. Among our findings: LISA science productivity is greatly enhanced by a full-featured US science center and an open access data model. As other major missions have demonstrated, a science center acts as both a locus and an amplifier of research innovation, data analysis, user support, user trai…
Recent detection of gravitational wave from nine black hole merger events and one neutron star merger event by LIGO and VIRGO shed a new light in the field of astrophysics. On the other hand, in the past decade, a few super-Chandrasekhar white dwarf candidates have been inferred through the peak luminosity of the light-curves of a few peculiar type Ia supernovae, though there is no direct detection of these objects so far. Similarly, a number of neutron stars with mass $>2M_\odot$ have also been observed. Continuous gravitational wave can be one of the alternate ways to detect these compact ob…
Extreme mass ratio inspirals (EMRIs), i.e. binary systems comprised by a compact stellar-mass object orbiting a massive black hole, are expected to be among the primary gravitational wave (GW) sources for the forthcoming LISA mission. The astrophysical processes leading to the formation of such systems still remain poorly understood, resulting into large uncertainties in the predicted cosmic rate of these sources, spanning at least three orders of magnitude. As LISA can individually resolve mostly EMRIs up to $z\gtrsim1$, the ensemble of signals below its detection threshold will add up incohe…
The Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA) is a future space-based gravitational wave (GW) detector designed to be sensitive to sources radiating in the low frequency regime (0.1 mHz to 1 Hz). LISA's interferometer signals will be dominated by laser frequency noise which has to be suppressed by about 7 orders of magnitude using an algorithm called Time-Delay Interferometry (TDI). Arm locking has been proposed to reduce the laser frequency noise by a few orders of magnitude to reduce the potential risks associated with TDI. In this paper, we present an updated performance model for arm locki…
One source of noise for the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA) will be time-varying changes of the space environment in the form of solar wind particles and photon pressure from fluctuating solar irradiance. The approximate magnitude of these effects can be estimated from the average properties of the solar wind and the solar irradiance. We use data taken by the ACE (Advanced Compton Explorer) satellite and the VIRGO (Variability of solar IRradiance and Gravity Oscillations) instrument on the SOHO satellite over an entire solar cycle to calculate the forces due to solar wind and photon …
The present work reports on a feasibility study commissioned by the Chinese Academy of Sciences of China to explore various possible mission options to detect gravitational waves in space alternative to that of the eLISA/LISA mission concept. Based on the relative merits assigned to science and technological viability, a few representative mission options descoped from the ALIA mission are considered. A semi-analytic Monte Carlo simulation is carried out to understand the cosmic black hole merger histories starting from intermediate mass black holes at high redshift as well as the possible sci…
