Temperature stability in the sub-milliHertz band with LISA Pathfinder
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Armano, M., J. Slutsky, J. I. Thorpe, E. Castelli, H. Audley, J. Baird, et al. "Temperature Stability in the Sub-milliHertz Band with LISA Pathfinder". Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society 486, no. 3 (2019):3368–3379. https://doi.org/10.1093/mnras/stz1017.
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This work was written as part of one of the author's official duties as an Employee of the United States Government and is therefore a work of the United States Government. In accordance with 17 U.S.C. 105, no copyright protection is available for such works under U.S. Law.
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Abstract
LISA Pathfinder (LPF) was a technology pioneering mission designed to test key technologies required for gravitational wave detection in space. In the low frequency regime (milliHertz and below), where space-based gravitational wave observatories will operate, temperature fluctuations play a crucial role since they can couple into the interferometric measurement and the test masses’ free-fall accuracy in many ways. A dedicated temperature measurement subsystem, with noise levels in 10 μK Hz⁻¹/² down to 1 mHz was part of the diagnostics unit onboard LPF. In this paper we report on the temperature measurements throughout mission operations, characterize the thermal environment, estimate transfer functions between different locations, and report temperature stability (and its time evolution) at frequencies as low as μ10 Hz, where typically values around 1 K Hz⁻¹/² were measured.