Gravity Probe Set For Launch

The launch of a prototype satellite to look for ripples in space and across time is back on track for Thursday following a day’s delay to review a potential technical concern with Europe’s Vega rocket, officials said on Wednesday.

The trailblazing Laser Interferometer Space Antenna, or LISA, spacecraft will spend about six months testing a technique to detect ripples in space and across time. These are “ripples” in the fabric of space produced by events which affect gravity in their region, such as supernovae and black hole.

The LISA Pathfinder could change that, according to ESA deputy mission scientist Oliver Jennrich.

It’s a crucial test of the technology that the European Space Agency hopes to deploy in the eLISA mission, set for 2034, which aims to let us see hidden parts of the universe by monitoring gravitational waves. If Einstein was right, gravitational waves emanate from supermassive black holes as they pull in other objects, but they have never been observed directly.

Like light, gravity travels in waves, though so far attempts to detect them with ground-based observatories have been unsuccessful.

“It’s an exciting time to be working in this field and we’re looking forward to the next stage of the search for evidence of gravitational waves”. In the full scale version of this kind of system, researchers will use these exacting measurements to know when a gravitational wave passes through the craft.

“There’s a whole spectrum of gravitational waves, just like there’s a whole spectrum of electromagnetic waves”, said astrophysicist Ira Thorpe of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center.

The LISA Pathfinder probe is gearing up to launch on its mission to explore the waves created from cosmic collisions.