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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.
Years ago I rented a tiny travel trailer that was quite old. The rent deal was fabulous and the guy that owned the park was a good fellow. At any rate I seem to have created my own gravity wave. I bedded a young woman and in the act of passion all four legs of the bed shot right through the floor. I never missed a stroke.
The fellow that owned the park came to make the repair the next day while the girl was still there. After he put in a new floor in the bedroom I entered and he congratulated me for the strength and success of my passions.
The moral being that if we musty have gravity waves we should get some good fun out of it!