E. Mitchell

TL;DR: The current status of the LISA Pathfinder mission is described, a precursor mission aimed at demonstrating key technologies for future space-based gravitational wave detectors, like LISA, and performance measurements and analysis of these flight components lead to an expected performance of theLISA Pathfinder which is a significant improvement over the mission requirements.

TL;DR: LISA Pathfinder as discussed by the authors is a dedicated technology demonstrator for the joint ESA/NASA Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA) mission, which essentially mimics one arm of the LISA constellation by shrinking the 5 million kilometre armlength down to a few tens of centimetres, giving up the sensitivity to gravitational waves, but keeping the measurement technology.

TL;DR: In this article, a quantitative assessment of the performance of the upcoming LISA Pathfinder geodesic explorer mission is presented, based on the results of extensive ground testing and simulation campaigns using flight hardware, flight control and operations algorithms.

TL;DR: The LISA Pathfinder (LPF) mission as discussed by the authors is the first in-flight test of low frequency gravitational wave detection metrology, which was designed to simulate one arm of space-borne gravitational wave detectors by shrinking the million kilometer scale arm lengths down to a few tens of centimeters.

TL;DR: In this paper, a quantitative assessment of the performance of the upcoming LISA Pathfinder geodesic explorer mission is presented based on the results of extensive ground testing and simulation campaigns using flight hardware and flight control and operations algorithms.