Planets and Moons Universe ID: 4748

LISA Pathfinder vs Solar System Dust

Visualizations by Tom Bridgman Released on November 18, 2019

Trajectory of the LISA Pathfinder mission from Earth orbit to its L1 halo orbit including impacts with inner solar system dust (yellow points) and time windows along the orbit when this capability is enabled (purple). With labels.

LISA Pathfinder, a mission led by ESA (the European Space Agency) that included NASA contributions, successfully demonstrated technologies needed to build a future space-based gravitational wave observatory, a tool for detecting ripples in space-time produced by, among other things, merging black holes. A team of NASA scientists leveraged LISA Pathfinder's record-setting sensitivity to map microscopic dust shed by comets and asteroids.

These animations follow the trajectory of LISA Pathfinder from Earth to its working "halo" orbit around Sun-Earth L1, a gravitational balance point about 930,000 miles (1.5 million kilometers) from Earth in the sun's direction, and show the locations of 54 dust impacts detected during the mission.

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Visualization Credits

Tom Bridgman (Global Science and Technology, Inc.): Lead Data Visualizer
James Ira Thorpe (NASA/GSFC): Scientist
Francis Reddy (University of Maryland College Park): Lead Writer
Scott Wiessinger (USRA): Lead Producer

Please give credit for this item to:
NASA's Scientific Visualization Studio

Science Paper:
Micrometeoroid Events in LISA Pathfinder

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