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Catching a Gravity Wave: Canceled Laser Space Antenna May Still Fly
from Scientific American
Ripples in the fabric of space-time regularly zip across the universe from titanic cosmic events, such as the mergers of supermassive black holes millions to billions of times the mass of the sun. These so-called gravitational waves ought to be ubiquitous but faint, and no experiment has yet registered the disturbance caused by a passing wave.
The Laser Interferometer Space Antenna was supposed to do just that. The spaceborne observatory, also known as LISA, was to be a joint mission between NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) to detect gravitational waves and give scientists a whole new window through which to look on the universe and understand its underpinnings.
Cost overruns concerning the next-generation James Webb Space Telescope apparently helped doom the ambitious joint mission--NASA and ESA dissolved their decadelong LISA partnership in March 2011. Reports of its death may have been greatly exaggerated, however, as researchers are still fighting hard toward launch. Even scaled-back versions of the project might still have a good chance of making revolutionary discoveries, the scientists maintain.
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