It is less than a week for the launch of LISA Pathfinder, the satellite of the European Space Agency (ESA) in charge of testing the technology in a few years will use the gravitational wave observatory future ESA.
The gravitational waves in space, predicted hundred years ago by Albert Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity, are ripples produced in space-time by the most violent events the universe as merging black holes or exploding supernovas.
The theory holds that these waves abound in the universe and carry information about the phenomena that originated probably the Big Bang itself which led the Universe. For now, we know that these waves exist but have not been captured directly.
The LISA Pathfinder mission will travel into space on December 2 aboard a rocket launched from French Guiana. Their final destination is the Lagrange point, 1.5 million kilometers from Earth where the gravitational forces between the Sun and Earth are more balanced.
The LISA Pathfinder mission is not capture gravitational waves by itself, but on a small scale to test the operation of ELISA technology, the future observatory that will be responsible to detect with the help of three satellites that will try to intercept them.
In short LISA Pathfinder will be something like a dress rehearsal for future observation instruments that will begin operating in 2034. And as this technology can not be verified on Earth, due to the influence of Earth’s gravity, it must be tested in space, something LISA
Pathfinder will do after reaching orbit, between February and September 2016. “To detect gravitational waves have to measure the distance between two bodies in freefall with a precision high, without any other disturbance to alter their positions, “he says Carlos F. Sopuerta , principal investigator of group-LISA Gravitational Astronomy Institute of Space Sciences.
LISA Pathfinder will this experiment with two identical cubic mass, 46 mm side and made of an alloy of gold and platinum, which float the vacuum and maintain a constant distance of 38 centimeters. The success of the satellite depends ELISA after playing these conditions but on a much larger scale, with three spacecraft separated by more than a million kilometers, a distance that will “detect gravitational waves from the most interesting phenomena of the Universe” , Sopuerta says.
The most complicated LISA mission will be to maintain the conditions of freefall and, therefore, the satellite includes technologies created specifically to counter the other forces, from the pressure that causes solar radiation effects of temperature or the magnetic forces of the satellite itself.
For this, the group-LISA Gravitational Astronomy Institute of Space Sciences (IEEC-CSIC) has designed, built and programmed Data Management Unit (DMU), on-board computer that controls the scientific experiments of the mission and receive information from all sensors to perform various maneuvers of repositioning every second.
In addition, this group It is designed diagnostic system: the set of sensors and actuators with high sensitivity and accuracy for the thermal and magnetic control and monitor ionized particles of cosmic radiation, among other things. In the construction of the DMU has collaborated SENER and GMV has been involved in software verification. “Until now astronomers have dedicated ourselves to look at the universe, but the study of gravitational waves allow us to listen, and that opens a whole new window of research,” he says Carlos F. Sopuerta .
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