H. B. Tu

TL;DR: The first results of the LISA Pathfinder in-flight experiment demonstrate that two free-falling reference test masses, such as those needed for a space-based gravitational wave observatory like LISA, can be put in free fall with a relative acceleration noise with a square root of the power spectral density.

TL;DR: An experimental analysis of force noise caused by stray electrostatic fields acting on a charged test mass inside a conducting enclosure, a key problem for precise gravitational experiments, is presented and an improved electrostatic model is analyzed.

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: The LISA Pathfinder mission will demonstrate the technology of drag-free test masses for use as inertial references in future space-based gravitational wave detectors as discussed by the authors, and the Pathfinder spacecraft will perform drag free flight about a test mass while measuring the acceleration of this primary test mass relative to a second reference test mass.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors report on how these kind of thermal diagnostics experiments were simulated in the last LPF Simulation Campaign (November, 2013) involving all the LPF Data Analysis team and using an end-to-end simulator of the whole spacecraft.