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A comment on LIGO's vibration isolation system.

Re:LIGO's vibration isolation system by Animats on Thursday February 11, 2016 @09:17PM (#11084886)
That's impressive. They didn't have to put it in orbit to get sufficient vibration isolation. The eLISA team must be so frustrated about this.[2] Their gravitational wave detector is in orbit at the L1 point, and their test masses just float in space. But they're not quite ready to turn everything on; that happens in early March.

XKCD: [1]

[1] http://xkcd.com/1642/ [2] https://www.elisascience.org/

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Re:LIGO's vibration isolation system by jessriedel on Thursday February 11, 2016 @10:16PM (#11085067)
LISA and LIGO aren't in competition. They are very different projects trying to be sensitive to very different frequencies. (Likewise, Hubble isn't competing with ground-based arrays of radar antenna even though both are looking for electromagnetic waves.)

Furthermore, the only satellite currently in orbit is the LISA pathfinder mission, which is just a testbed for some of the requisite tech. It is incapable of detecting gravitational waves.

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Re:LIGO's vibration isolation system by iamcreasy on Thursday February 11, 2016 @10:03PM (#11085029)
A picture is worth a thousand words : https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e2/LISA_orb...

Source : https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Evolved_Laser_Interferometer_Spa...

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