NASA to rejoin forces with ESA to launch gravitational-wave space detector!

News was in the air since the LIGO discovery, but the 11th LISA symposium in Zürich made it official: after its dropout in 2011, NASA is ready to rejoin ESA in the effort to build the first gravitational-wave observatory on space. The effect of this dropout was not only to change the mission's name (from the original "LISA" to "eLISA") but also to drastically reduce its budget, resulting in a smaller apparatus and reduced science case.

The recent GW discovery has boosted this field and, after the announcement in February, it was immediately clear that the plan was to anticipate eLISA flight (initially tentatively scheduled around 2034). Now, it seems that eLISA could fly some years earlier (around 2030) and, most importantly, it will probably be build in its original LISA design, thanks to the joint effort of ESA and NASA.

eLISA is a triangular laser interferometer that will search for gravitational waves in space

After the LIGO/Virgo discovery, after the amazing success of the LISA Pathfinder, this is yet another great news for gravitational physics and science in general. Year 2016 will definitely be remembered as marking the birth of a new discipline.

Good news for eLISA

Some time ago, the European Space Agency appointed a Gravitational Observatory Advisory Team (GOAT) to assess the technical feasibility and effort of the space mission eLISA to build a laser interformeter for gravitational-wave detection. eLISA is the (much) bigger sister of aLIGO and aVirgo, but it operates in space and its arms are longer than 1 million km!

The GOAT reported that the mission is not only technically feasible but scientifically compelling and suggests to anticipate the proposed launch date from 2034 to 2029. It's a very exciting time for gravitational-wave science!

Read the rest of the story on BBC.

Artistic illustration of eLISA's concept

The Gravitational Universe

May 24th, 2013, 12:00 CEST is the deadline for submission of the eLISA white paper to the European Space Agency (ESA).

Quoting the webpage of the project: "Gravity is the dominant force in the universe. We propose the first ever mission to survey the entire universe directly with gravitational waves, to tell us about theformation of structure and galaxies, stellar evolution, the early universe, and the structure and nature of spacetime itself. Most importantly, there will be enormous potential for discovering the parts of the universe that are invisible by other means, such as black holes, the Big Bang, and other, as yet unknown objects. 

The European Space Agency has recently launched the process for choosing candidates for the next large mission launch slots. The first step in this process is the submission of white papers advocating science themes. The eLISA team will submit a compelling science case, which will be addressed by our eLISA mission concept in 2028."

79 authors and 80 contributors have worked intensively to produce this impressive white paper. The proposed mission itself is epic:

"Today we can see the beauty of the universe with modern telescopes in many wavelengths. Observing the universe with gravitational waves—which are analogous to acoustic waves—will allow us to hear the universe for the first time. 

eLISA will be the first observatory to directly detect low frequency gravitational waves. It will measure the relative displacement of free-falling test masses, one million kilometers apart, by means of laser interferometry. This will enable us to determine parameters like mass, spin, orbital elements, and luminosity distance of the sources with unprecedented precision. Large parts of the technologies necessary for such a mission have already been developed, and will be tested in space by LISA Pathfinder in 2015."

Almost 1000 scientists worldwide are supporting the mission, including Stephen Hawking, Edward Witten, Nobel Laureate Gerard 't Hooft and many of the most renewed faculties of Physics and Astrophysics worldwide.

If you want to learn what all of this is for, check out the project webpage!