“The gravitational waves that LISA is designed to observe have typical timescales of hours. So long as the distance between the satellites is smoothly changing over these time scales, the gravitational waves can be observed as an additional modulation on top of this smooth change. Each satellite is in an independent Keplerian orbit around the Sun with the plane of the triangle inclined at 60 degrees to the plane of the ecliptic. Over the course of the mission, the nominal 2.5 million kilometer distance between each satellite will vary by hundreds of thousands of kilometers. LISA will be able to measure the absolute distance between the satellites to a few centimeters and will measure hour-scale fluctuations at the level of several picometers (1pm = 1 trillionth of a meter), the level required to detect gravitational waves.”
https://lisa.nasa.gov/faq.html
Greg Egan /
npub12c…gd38p
2024-10-05 08:55:04
in reply to nevent1q…khzs
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2024-10-05 08:55:04Event JSON
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"content": "“The gravitational waves that LISA is designed to observe have typical timescales of hours. So long as the distance between the satellites is smoothly changing over these time scales, the gravitational waves can be observed as an additional modulation on top of this smooth change. Each satellite is in an independent Keplerian orbit around the Sun with the plane of the triangle inclined at 60 degrees to the plane of the ecliptic. Over the course of the mission, the nominal 2.5 million kilometer distance between each satellite will vary by hundreds of thousands of kilometers. LISA will be able to measure the absolute distance between the satellites to a few centimeters and will measure hour-scale fluctuations at the level of several picometers (1pm = 1 trillionth of a meter), the level required to detect gravitational waves.”\n\nhttps://lisa.nasa.gov/faq.html",
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