F. Guzman

LISA Pathfinder: the experiment and the route to LISA

LISA Pathfinder (LPF) is a science and technology demonstrator planned by the European Space Agency in view of the LISA mission. As a scientific payload, the LISA Technology Package on board LPF will be the most precise geodesics explorer flown as of today, both in terms of displacement and acceleration sensitivity. The challenges embodied by LPF make it a unique mission, paving the way towards the space-borne detection of gravitational waves with LISA. This paper summarizes the basics of LPF, and the progress made in preparing its effective implementation in flight. We hereby give an overview of the experiment philosophy and assumptions to carry on the measurement. We report on the mission plan and hardware design advances and on the progress on detailing measurements and operations. Some light will be shed on the related data processing algorithms. In particular, we show how to single out the acceleration noise from the spacecraft motion perturbations, how to account for dynamical deformation parameters distorting the measurement reference and how to decouple the actuation noise via parabolic free flight.

LISA Pathfinder: mission and status

LISA Pathfinder, the second of the European Space Agencys Small Missions for Advanced Research in Technology (SMART), is a dedicated technology demonstrator for the joint ESA/NASA Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA) mission. The technologies required for LISA are many and extremely challenging. This coupled with the fact that some flight hardware cannot be fully tested on ground due to Earth-induced noise led to the implementation of the LISA Pathfinder mission to test the critical LISA technologies in a flight environment. LISA Pathfinder essentially mimics one arm of the LISA constellation by shrinking the 5 million kilometre armlength down to a few tens of centimetres, giving up the sensitivity to gravitational waves, but keeping the measurement technology: the distance between the two test masses is measured using a laser interferometric technique similar to one aspect of the LISA interferometry system. The scientific objective of the LISA Pathfinder mission consists then of the first in-flight test of low frequency gravitational wave detection metrology. LISA Pathfinder is due to be launched in 2013 on-board a dedicated small launch vehicle (VEGA). After a series of apogee raising manoeuvres using an expendable propulsion module, LISA Pathfinder will enter a transfer orbit towards the first Sun?Earth Lagrange point (L1). After separation from the propulsion module, the LPF spacecraft will be stabilized using the micro-Newton thrusters, entering a 500?000 km by 800?000 km Lissajous orbit around L1. Science results will be available approximately 2 months after launch.

The LISA Pathfinder Mission

In this paper, we describe the current status of the LISA Pathfinder mission, a precursor mission aimed at demonstrating key technologies for future space-based gravitational wave detectors, like LISA. Since much of the flight hardware has already been constructed and tested, we will show that performance measurements and analysis of these flight components lead to an expected performance of the LISA Pathfinder which is a significant improvement over the mission requirements, and which actually reaches the LISA requirements over the entire LISA Pathfinder measurement band.

Noise sources in the LTP heterodyne interferometer

The LISA Technology Package uses a heterodyne Mach–Zehnder interferometer to monitor the relative motion of the test masses with picometer accuracy. This paper discusses two classes of noise sources that were identified and investigated during the prototype experiments. Most troublesome are electrically induced sidebands on the light, which give rise to nonlinearities in the interferometer output. Even worse, if the differential pathlength between two optical fibres fluctuates, a noise term of milliradian amplitude appears and completely spoils the performance. We discuss the origin and mitigation of this process. Dissimilar beam shapes of the interfering beams produce another type of noise in conjunction with beam jitter and spatially inhomogeneous photodetectors. To study and minimize this effect, we have built a real-time high-resolution phasefront imaging system that will be used for the production of the flight model.

Data analysis for the LISA Technology Package

The LISA Technology Package (LTP) on board the LISA Pathfinder mission aims to demonstrate some key concepts for LISA which cannot be tested on ground. The mission consists of a series of preplanned experimental runs. The data analysis for each experiment must be designed in advance of the mission. During the mission, the analysis must be carried out promptly so that the results can be fed forward into subsequent experiments. As such a robust and flexible data analysis environment needs to be put in place. Since this software is used during mission operations and effects the mission timeline, it must be very robust and tested to a high degree. This paper presents the requirements, design and implementation of the data analysis environment (LTPDA) that will be used for analysing the data from LTP. The use of the analysis software to perform mock data challenges (MDC) is also discussed, and some highlights from the first MDC are presented.

Interferometry for the LISA technology package LTP: an update

This paper gives an update on the status of the LISA technology package (LTP) which is to be launched in 2009 by ESA as a technology demonstration mission for the space- borne gravitational wave observatory LISA. The dominant noise source in the interferometer prototype has been investigated and improved such that it is now comfortably below its budget at all frequencies.

LISA Phasemeter development

The baseline concept of LISA had been developed within an industrial investigation by Astrium/EADS and is being reviewed since 2005 in an ongoing formulation phase. One of the most important key technology development issues remains the demonstration of the interferometric readout of the main science measurement. This includes the hardware development of an appropriate Phase Measurement System (PMS). We present the status of our work concerning the design and implementation of a LISA‐like PMS with particular emphasis on the hardware development based on Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGA’s) as main technology platform and we report on our first results demonstrating the performance of the PMS with synthetic signals.

LISA Pathfinder data analysis

As the launch of LISA Pathfinder (LPF) draws near, more and more effort is being put in to the preparation of the data analysis activities that will be carried out during the mission operations. The operations phase of the mission will be composed of a series of experiments that will be carried out on the satellite. These experiments will be directed and analysed by the data analysis team, which is part of the operations team. The operations phase will last about 90 days, during which time the data analysis team aims to fully characterize the LPF, and in particular, its core instrument the LISA Technology Package. By analysing the various couplings present in the system, the different noise sources that will disturb the system, and through the identification of the key physical parameters of the system, a detailed noise budget of the instrument will be constructed that will allow the performance of the different subsystems to be assessed and projected towards LISA. This paper describes the various aspects of the full data analysis chain that are needed to successfully characterize the LPF and build up the noise budget during mission operations.

The first mock data challenge for LISA Pathfinder

The data analysis of the LISA Technology Package (LTP) will comprise a series of discrete experiments, each focusing on a particular noise measurement or characterization of the instrument in various operating modes. Each of these experiments must be analysed and planned in advance of the mission because the results of a given experiment will have an impact on those that follow. As such, a series of mock data challenges (MDCs) will be developed and carried out with the aim of preparing the analysis tools and optimizing the various planned analyses. The first of these MDCs (MDC1) is a simplified treatment of the dynamics along the axis joining the two test masses onboard LISA Pathfinder. The validation of the dynamical model by predicting the spectra of the interferometer output data is shown, a prediction for the data analysis is calculated and, finally, several simulated interferometer data sets are analysed and calibrated to equivalent out-of-loop test mass acceleration.

Towards a FPGA-controlled deep phase modulation interferometer

Deep phase modulation interferometry was proposed as a method to enhance homodyne interferometers to work over many fringes. In this scheme, a sinusoidal phase modulation is applied in one arm while the demodulation takes place as a post-processing step. In this contribution we report on the development to implement this scheme in a fiber coupled interferometer controlled by means of a FPGA, which includes a LEON3 soft-core processor. The latter acts as a CPU and executes a custom made application to communicate with a host PC. In contrast to usual FPGA-based designs, this implementation allows a real-time fine tuning of the parameters involved in the setup, from the control to the post-processing parameters.