Gravity and astrophysics at UMiss

LISA Pathfinder, the technology demonstration mission for a space-based detector, demonstrated that two test masses can be put in free fall with a relative acceleration sufficiently free of noise to meet the requirements needed for space-based gravitational-wave detection.

The LISA Pathfinder results were published in Physical Review Letters with a Physics Viewpoint by David Reitze. Pathfinder greatly exceeds the mission requirements set for “differential acceleration noise” (the frequency-dependent residual acceleration between the masses). The most impressive result is that Pathfinder even exceeds the LISA noise requirement over the high-frequency range above 10 mHz, and comes close over much of the low frequency range. Look at that Figure 1 in the paper…

Congratulations to the Pathfinder team!