GW3 - Lisa Pathfinder and Space-Borne Gravitational Wave Detectors |
Speaker |
Paczkowski, Sarah |
Coauthors |
Armano, Michele; Audley, Heather; Diepholz, Ingo; Ferraioli, Luigi; Gibert, Ferran; Hewitson, Martin; Hueller, Mauro; Karnesis, Nikolaos; Kaune, Brigitte; Korsakova, Natalia; Nofrarias, Miquel; Plagnol, Eric; Vitale, Stefano; Thorpe, James Ira; Ferroni, Valerio; Vetrugno,Daniele; Inchauspe, Henri; Wass, Peter; Dolesi, Rita; Weber, William Joseph; Danzmann, Karsten; Jennrich, Oliver; McNamara,Paul W.; Wittchen, Andreas |
Talk Title |
The Free-Flight Experiment on LISA Pathfinder |
Abstract |
LISA Pathfinder is a technology demonstrator mission for future gravitational wave detection in space to be launched in autumn 2015. Its main goal is to show the feasibility of an inertial test mass and to estimate the residual differential force noise. The current best estimate of the LISA Pathfinder noise performance, which is well below the requirements, is limited by electrostatic actuation noise towards the lower end of the measurement band. This becomes more significant considering that this actuation is not present in the current design of a LISA-like mission. A solution to assess the underlying noise is provided by the free-flight experiment where the x-axis actuation is switched off for short regular intervals. The actuation is periodically restored to kick the test mass back to its nominal position. These force kicks are noisy and therefore the data in these sections must be ignored when trying to estimate the quiet residual differential acceleration between the kicks. The resulting gaps present an interesting data analysis challenge. In this talk, I will present a new approach to fit individual free-flight segments in the time-domain and an outline of the analysis during operations. |
Talk view |
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