ESA Science & Technology - Publications Archive

The internal Phase 0 study of the Laser interferometer Space Antenna (LISA) mission has been performed at ESA's Concurrent Design Facility (CDF) and ran from 8 March to 5 May 2017. An internal final presentation has been prepared by the CDF Team, summarizing the outcome of the Phase 0 study. This presentation can be downloaded as a PDF (28 MB) by clicking the image to the right, or the 'link to publication' link below.

Contents of the presentation:

p.1	Introduction	p.195	TT&C
p.6	CDF Study objectives	p.207	Data handling
p.10	Science objectives	p.220	Power
p.49	Systems	p.238	Mechanisms
p.78	Payload	p.255	Configuration
p.104	Mission analysis	p.259	Structures
p.124	Ground segment and operations	p.270	Thermal control
p.135	DFACS - AOCS	p.282	Risk
p.156	Chemical propulsion	p.306	Programmatics / AIV
p.172	Electric propulsion	p.325	Conclusions

Reference: ESA/SRE(2011)3

This report, the so-called Yellow Book, contains the results of ESA's assessment study (Phase 0/A) of the candidate L-class Cosmic Vision mission LISA.

Reference: SRE-PA/2011.002/

This technical review report for the LISA candidate mission presents the outcome of an ESA internal review of this L-class candidate mission in the Cosmic Vision 2015-2025 plan. The review was concluded at the end of the mission assessment phase and carried out in frame of the down-selection for L-class missions to proceed to the definition phase. The review focused on the technical and programmatic elements of the mission.

LISA is perhaps the most ambitious space mission envisaged for the coming decades. A recent assessment of astrophysics research proposed for NASA's Beyond Einstein programme by America's National Research Council (NRC) gave the "extraordinarily original and technically bold" project its highest scientific ranking. Under joint development by NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA), LISA's goal is to detect gravitational waves - fluctuations in the fabric of space and time - by measuring the relative motions of three spacecraft with great precision. Although that assessment carried out by the NRC saw LISA as the "least scientifically risky" of the proposals for future flagship missions, there is no getting away from the fact that no one has ever tried anything remotely similar before.

The Mission Summary of the Cornerstone Study Results: LISA.

The primary goal of the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA) mission is to detect and observe gravitational waves from massive black holes and galactic binaries in the frequency range 10^-4 to 10^-1 Hz. This low-frequency range is inaccessible to groundbased interferometers because of the unshieldable background of local gravitational noise, and because ground-based interferometers are limited in length to a few kilometres.