Ponente
Descripción
The LISA mission is an all-sky monitor that will offer a wide view on a dynamic cosmos using gravitational waves as new and unique messengers to unveil the Gravitational Universe. As such, it will provide the closest ever view of the early processes at TeV energies and can probe the entire universe from its smallest scales around singularities and black holes all the way to cosmological dimensions.
During the LISA mission, after deployment and during operation, the 3 spacecrafts forming the LISA instrument need to be aligned in a triangular formation determined by the acquisition by each spacecraft of the inter-spacecraft laser links. For this purpose, each of the spacecraft will be equipped with an Star-tracker system which will provide the coarse alignment of the spacecrafts. However, due to technical limitations, the Star-tracker will not be able to ensure the acquisition of the inter-spacecraft laser link by each of the 3 spacecrafts, and therefore the spacecrafts will require an additional fine alignment system to allow them to acquire the said laser links and establish an operational configuration. This latter system is called the Constellation Acquisition System (CAS) system.
During the last 4 years, the Institute of Space Science has designed, developed and tested a breadboard-model of the CAS system (i.e. w/o redundancy) and then developed a TRL 5-6 Engineering Model of the full CAS system (w/ redundancy) in compliance with the CAS system requirements and compatible with the latest the CAS system volume envelope provided by UK-ATC. We present here the constructive details and performance highlights of a metrology stage that will use heterodyne interferometry to monitor the displacement of an optical platform that will house the CAS SWIR camera for determining the response and accuracy of centroiding algorithms.
