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Biggest Detector To Look For Gravitational Waves
Hugh Pickens sends in coverage in the Telegraph of a joint NASA-ESA experimental mission, to launch around 2020. It involves three spacecraft orbiting the Sun, separated by 3 million miles, each with a payload of two lasers and a 4.6-cm cube of gold-platinum alloy. The point of it all is to look for gravitational waves. The mission is called LISA, a reasonably non-strained acronym for Laser Interferometer Space Antenna. The Telegraph makes a point of LISA being the largest experiment ever constructed (in terms of its dimensions). Neither that newspaper nor the project page at NASA mentions how much the experiment will cost, but it's almost certainly an order of magnitude or more above the $66 million estimated for a gravitational wave detector the size of the galaxy, which we discussed last fall.
it's only the thin coating surrounding the mass that is made of a gold/platinum alloy, not the entire cube. So it is NOT 2kg of gold...
actually gold coatings are used quite a lot for these things.
They have a mass floating freely in space, and surrounding it is this gold/platinum coat, that never touches it, it just flies around it and has microthrusters to keep it away from the central mass. This gold/platinum coat is shielding the mass from some external influences, like the solar magnetic field, so that the central mass only feels the influence of the gravitational waves.