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Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Maryland 20771

ENGINEERING COLLOQUIUM

Monday, Oct 17, 2016 / 3:30 PM, Building 3 Auditorium

Ira Thorpe

"Free Falling: LISA Pathfinder and the Road to Space-Based Gravitational Wave Observatories"

ABSTRACT -- This February's announcement that gravitational waves from colliding black holes had been measured enthralled both scientists and the general public. Coming a century after Albert Einstein revolutionized our understanding of gravity, this discovery heralds the birth of a new form of astronomy, one that promises new insights about the nature of our universe and gravity itself.  Just as electromagnetic astronomers have worked to open up new regions of their spectrum with radio, infrared, x-ray, and gamma-ray telescopes, gravitational wave astronomers want to open different regions of the gravitational wave spectrum with new instruments. Perhaps the most promising region of this spectrum is the milliHertz band, which can only be accessed with space-based detectors such as the proposed Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA). 

A major step forward in this effort came with last December's launch of the LISA Pathfinder spacecraft, a dedicated technology demonstrator for future space-based gravitational wave observatories.  Led by the European Space Agency, with contributions from European member states and NASA, LISA Pathfinder places two reference masses in near-perfect free fall. Such reference masses are the fundamental building blocks of a gravitational wave detector and LISA Pathfinder provides the first opportunity to study accelerations at the femto-g level.  This talk will provide an overview of the promise of space-based gravitational wave observatories, the design of the LISA Pathfinder spacecraft, and the current status and preliminary results from the mission.

SPEAKER -- Ira Thorpe is an astrophysicist in the Gravitational Astrophysics Laboratory at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center who focuses on space-based gravitational wave observatories. Born and raised in Santa Fe, New Mexico, Ira attended Bucknell University in Lewisburg PA where he graduated summa cum laude with degrees in Mechanical Engineering and Physics in 2001. After completing a masters degree in Physics at the University of Maryland, during which he worked with the nascent gravitational wave group at NASA/GSFC, Ira moved to the University of Florida, where he obtained a Ph.D. in physics in 2006 with a thesis on optical metrology for long-baseline gravitational wave detectors in space. After completing his Ph.D., Ira moved back to NASA/GSFC to work on the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA) project, first as a NASA Postdoctoral Fellow and then as a civil servant. For the past three years, Ira's primary research topic has been the LISA Pathfinder mission, a European-led mission dedicated to demonstrating key technologies for future space-based gravitational wave observatories


Engineering Colloquium home page: https://ecolloq.gsfc.nasa.gov