LISA, the first gravitational-wave observatory in space, gets go-ahead

• After today’s adoption by the European Space Agency (ESA), the mission advances to the construction phase and is planned to be launched in 2035
• IEEC researchers at the Institute of Space Sciences lead the Spanish contribution to the mission, as they did in its predecessor mission LISA Pathfinder
• The Institute of Cosmos Sciences and the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya – BarcelonaTech are also participating in the mission

The European Space Agency’s Science Programme Committee has approved today the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA) mission, the first scientific endeavour to detect and study gravitational  waves from space. ESA recognises through this step, formally called ‘adoption’, that the mission concept and  technology are sufficiently advanced, and gives the go-ahead to build the instruments and  spacecraft. This work will start in January 2025 once a European industrial contractor has  been chosen.  

LISA is not just one spacecraft but a constellation of three. They will trail Earth in its orbit around the Sun, forming an exquisitely accurate equilateral triangle in space. Each side of  the triangle will be 2.5 million km long (more than six times the Earth-Moon distance), and the spacecraft will exchange laser beams over this distance. The launch of the three spacecraft is planned for 2035, on an Ariane 6 rocket. 

LISA is made possible by a collaboration between ESA, NASA, and an international consortium of scientists (the LISA consortium). The Spanish contribution is led by the Institute of Space Sciences (ICE-CSIC) through researchers who are members of the Institute of Space Studies of Catalonia (IEEC — Institut d’Estudis Espacials de Catalunya). The Institute of Cosmos Sciences of the University of Barcelona (ICCUB) and the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya – BarcelonaTech (UPC) also participate in the mission through researchers who are all affiliated members of the IEEC.

Bringing ‘sound’ to the cosmic movie

Just over a century ago, the physicist Albert Einstein made the revolutionary prediction that when massive  objects accelerate, they shake the fabric of spacetime, producing miniscule ripples known as  gravitational waves. Thanks to modern technological developments, it is now possible  to detect these most elusive of signals. 

LISA will detect, across the entire Universe, the ripples in spacetime caused when huge black  holes at the centres of galaxies collide. This will enable scientists to trace the origin of these  objects, to chart how they grow to be millions of times more massive than the Sun and to establish the role they play in the evolution of galaxies.  

“LISA is an endeavour that has never been tried before. Using laser beams over distances of  tens of kilometres, ground-based instrumentation can detect gravitational waves coming  from events involving star-sized objects – such as supernova explosions or merging of hyper dense stars and stellar-mass black holes. To expand the frontier of gravitational studies we  must go to space,” explains LISA lead project scientist Nora Lützgendorf. 

The mission is poised to capture the predicted gravitational ‘ringing’ from the initial moments of our Universe and offer a direct glimpse into the very first seconds after the Big Bang. Additionally, because gravitational waves carry information on the distance of the  objects that emitted them, LISA will help researchers measure the change in the expansion of the Universe with a different type of yardstick from the techniques used by the Euclid space mission and  other surveys, validating their results. 

In our own galaxy, LISA will detect many merging pairs of compact objects  like white dwarfs or neutron stars and give us a unique insight into the final stages of the evolution of these systems. By pinpointing their position and distances, LISA will further our grasp of the structure of the Milky Way. 

To detect gravitational waves, LISA will use pairs of solid gold-platinum cubes – so called test masses (slightly smaller than Rubik’s cubes), free-floating in special housing at the heart of  each spacecraft. Gravitational waves will cause tiny changes in the distances between the masses in the different spacecraft, and the mission will track these variations using laser interferometry. 

This technique requires shooting laser beams from one spacecraft to the other and then  superimposing their signal to determine changes in the masses’ distances down to a few  billionths of a millimetre. The spacecraft must be designed to ensure that nothing, besides the geometry of spacetime itself, affects the movement of the masses, which are in freefall.

Spanish contribution to LISA

The Spanish contribution focuses on the Science Diagnostics Subsystem (SDS), one of the three main flight subsystems. Its goal is to measure the environmental disturbances on board each satellite in the constellation in order to differentiate them from the effect that gravitational waves would produce. The SDS will have temperature, magnetic field and radiation sensors on each satellite.

“In order to detect gravitational waves, LISA will measure the displacement between free falling masses in each of the three satellites in space at an unprecedented level down to the picometre level, roughly speaking the size of atoms,” says Miquel Nofrarias, experimental researcher at ICE-CSIC and IEEC, and member of the LISA Consortium. “SDS sensors will have to reach levels of precision and stability also unprecedented in space to be able to differentiate the effect of tiny environmental fluctuations from the one produced by a gravitational wave,” he adds.

Besides the contribution to the LISA instrument, the ICE-CSIC/IEEC will also lead the development of a Spanish Data Distribution Centre together with the necessary algorithms for the science exploitation. “The main goal is to provide the Spanish scientific community with the tools required to make the science potential of LISA a reality, so that we can make revolutionary discoveries with impact in Astrophysics, Cosmology and Fundamental Physics,” says Carlos F. Sopuerta, ICE-CSIC and IEEC researcher and member of ESA’s LISA Science Study Team.

At the same time, the ICCUB Technology Unit will actively participate in the two aforementioned aspects: the instrumentation part, with the construction of a radiation sensor on board the satellites, as well as the definition of the distributed data processing centre in Barcelona.

The Department of Electronic Engineering of the UPC, in turn, collaborates with ICE-CSIC scientists in the design of new magnetic sensors based on MEMS technologies that could be developed for the LISA mission or other future missions. They are also involved in the design of very high-sensitivity temperature sensors, which will be part of the monitoring system of the gravitational wave detector of the LISA mission. “These sensors will be able to detect temperature changes of less than a microkelvin,” says Juan Ramos, researcher at the UPC and the IEEC.

The spacecraft follows in the footsteps of its predecessor LISA Pathfinder, which demonstrated that it is possible to keep the test masses in freefall to an astonishing level of precision. The Spanish contribution to LISA Pathfinder, launched in 2015, was also led by ICE-CSIC and IEEC within the Gravitational Astronomy research group of the ICE-CSIC. 

Press release prepared in collaboration with the Institute of Space Sciences, the Institute of Cosmos Sciences, the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya and ESA.

Links

• IEEC
• ICE-CSIC
• ICCUB
• UPC
• LISA

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About the IEEC

The Institute of Space Studies of Catalonia (IEEC — Institut d’Estudis Espacials de Catalunya) promotes and coordinates space research and technology development in Catalonia for the benefit of society. IEEC fosters collaborations both locally and worldwide and is an efficient agent of knowledge, innovation and technology transfer. As a result of more than 25 years of high-quality research, done in collaboration with major international organisations, IEEC ranks among the best international research centres, focusing on areas such as: astrophysics, cosmology, planetary science, and Earth Observation. IEEC’s engineering division develops instrumentation for ground- and space-based projects, and has extensive experience in working with private or public organisations from the aerospace and other innovation sectors.

The IEEC is a non-profit public sector foundation that was established in February 1996. It has a Board of Trustees composed of the Generalitat de Catalunya, Universitat de Barcelona (UB), Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB), Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya · BarcelonaTech (UPC), and the Spanish Research Council (CSIC). The IEEC is also a CERCA centre.