Talk
Charge Management – Verification Testing and Flight Hardware Development
Cosmic rays will charge the Test Masses inside the LISA satellites. Interaction with electric fields then creates acceleration noise that can limit the sensitivity of the Gravitational Wave measurement. To prevent this, we discharge the Test Masses with ultraviolet (UV) light via the photoelectric effect, a technique successfully employed in the LISA Pathfinder mission. However, the Charge Management Device (CMD) for LISA will utilize UV LEDs, a departure from LISA Pathfinder’s approach.
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Apparent Yield Measurements using a LISA-like Gravitational Reference Sensor and the University of Florida Torsion Pendulum
Space-based gravitational missions rely on the pure free-fall of isolated test masses (TM). Charge build-up on these TMs will incur spurious electrostatic forces which ultimately spoil the high-precision measurements necessary to reach the required mission performance.
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