Gravity Space Mission Passes Critical Test

After just four months of scientists announcing the first gravitational wave detection, researchers from the European Space Agency have taken a vital step toward catching some for themselves.

The team responsible for the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA) Pathfinder mission, the prototype of a spacecraft specifically designed to detect gravitational waves from space, announced a the success of their free-fall test. Gravitational waves are ripples found in space that could help learn about mysterious space objects such as black holes, according to a report by space.com.

The test, which was described in a  Physical Review Letters study revealed that the spacecraft's golden innards were able to experience the closest thing to a free fall that have been observed in a man-made object.

"With LISA Pathfinder, we have created the quietest place known to humankind. Its performance is spectacular and exceeds all our expectations by far," Karsten Danzmann, director at the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics and director of the Institute for Gravitational Physics at Leibniz University Hannover, both in Germany, said in a statement.

BBC News also reported that there is currently a lot of excitement going on around gravitational waves which create disastrous cosmic events, such as the merger of black holes and the explosion of giant stars.

These unexplainable events were first confirmed last year at the Advanced Ligo facilities in the US. What they did was they picked up very faint disturbance in their laser interferometers as waves from far-distant, coalescing black holes passed through the Earth.

The success has been known as one of the greatest scientific breakthroughs in decades. A report from The Washington Post that researchers would like to make use of this same capability into space to observe the waves that are created by different events which are usually far from the sensitivities of ground laboratories.

The coming together of gargantuan black holes as whole galaxies crash into each other is the kind of source this future mission would target. However, before the approval of this expensive venture, it has to show that the major technologies can work on the proposed criteria. Hence, the European Space Agency's (Esa) Lisa Pathfinder mission.

The satellite was launched in December set up with an instrument designed to measure and maintain a 38cm separation between two small gold-platinum blocks.

These "test masses" were detached once in orbit and allowed to go into free-fall inside the spacecraft. A laser interferometer - in essence a very precise ruler - was then set the task of tracking the cubes' behavior.

"Our requirement was that we had to measure the position of the test masses to nine picometres per root hertz, and our on-orbit performance is actually about 30 femtometres - so we're about a factor of 300 better than requirements," explained Esa project scientist Paul McNamara.