The European LISA Pathfinder scientific satellite blasted off yesterday, starting a pioneering mission that seeks to capture directly for the first time gravitational waves and thus, in the long term, contribute to the study of supernovas and black holes.
With a day late because of a technical incident, the device took off aboard a rocket Vega spaceport town of Kourou, French Guiana, at 4.04 GMT, as confirmed by the headquarters of the European Space Agency (ESA), located in the German city of Darmstadt.
The spacecraft undocked from the rocket at 5:50 GMT, successfully and on schedule, completing the first phase of a complex process of progressive separation on the way to its final position 1.5 million km from Earth . “We have successfully received the first signal from LISA Pathfinder. We are extremely happy,” he said minutes after separation Director Flight operations center of ESA, Andreas Rudolph. The next ten days will be key to continue gradually moving away from the Earth LISA Pathfinder and during this period the ESA has provided a series of critical maneuvers involve 50 scientists working in shifts day and night. Until December 11, they will light six times the satellite propulsion modules, each time after making the elliptical orbit that trace the ship is much broader. Once this phase, the ship will return a month later to light their propulsion modules to continue its path toward the Sun, reaching the end of January the so-called Lagrange Point 1. This place is ideal for experiments of LISA Pathfinder, because that is where the forces of gravity of the Earth and Sun are offset, canceling the interference. Director of Science and Robotic Exploration ESA, Álvaro Giménez, said that then begin “the challenge for scientists” for this “very special ship” is “trying something that has never been proven.” The heart of the mission are two identical cubic mass, 46 mm side and two kilos, made of an alloy of gold and platinum, floating inside a complex mechanism that keeps them isolated and controls all external conditions. The aim is to measure with the highest precision (up to picometer, a trillionth of a meter) how these masses, arranged at a constant distance of 38 centimeters behave, and to detect any difference between them, since no outside influence should move in perfect sync. Gimenez, who branded the mission of “very ambitious”, said however that the LISA Pathfinder is “just a step, albeit a big one” within an even larger project. If the technology is proven accurate and reliable, ESA hopes to launch by 2034 the ELISA project, which would consist of three satellites forming a triangle of five million kilometers on a side, with one of these masses each. Scientists point out that following the changes that can be recorded in the measurements for each of these satellites could hide gravitational waves, an element that Albert Einstein postulated one hundred years ago in his General Theory of Relativity. According to experts gravitational waves in space, undulations produced in the space-time for very violent events like the explosion of a supernova or the merger of two black holes are plentiful and contain key information such as the cause of their origin. Among that information could be found, the experts add, clues to some of the fundamental mysteries of the cosmos pending resolution as data about the Big Bang that gave rise to the universe. So far the scientific community has never managed to capture these waves directly, despite having indirect evidence of their existence. For identification and analysis still years away, but yesterday they may be closer after the launch of the LISA Pathfinder.
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