I recommend the two animations on the wiki page of eLISA, they are worth a thousands words to understand the (crazy!) orbit of this contraption:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolved_Laser_Interferometer_S...

Wow, zero-drag satellites are a really elegant idea!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-drag_satellite

You must see umbrellas and parasols as elegant as well.

A precursor concept of a zero-drag satellite can be seen in Stargate SG1: "The Serpent's Venom", where an armed mine from an orbital minefield is brought aboard a shuttle, and the pilot must match the mine's trajectory changes.

"The Drag-free Satellite", the paper referenced in the Wikpedia article is from 1964, slightly older than SG1.

Also, your comment would be much nicer without the first sentence. And if you think about it, umbrellas are pretty neat. The folding mechanism is nifty, if you ask me.

look at this idiot, he can find beauty in elegant mechanisms!

It's so beautifully elegant to hold it aloft with your outstretched arm.

Wow, I didn't think it was possible to have three orbits that maintain an equilateral triangle like that. (I'm assuming the satellites only need to thrust against smaller influences like solar wind.)

If you like that orbit, look into the hopf fibration!

There is a current space experiment to measure the behavior of two elisa nodes. They are only a foot apart instead of a planned million kilometers. The purpose is a low cost in situ test of instruments. And also to survey the types of in situ instrumental and evironmental noise. It took decades to reduce LIGO noise to acceptable levels.

They should build one on the Moon.

One of the opening scenes from the transhuman adventure novel Diaspora by Greg Egan involves a robot on the moon tending a large laser interferometer which observes two inspiraling neutron stars. Perhaps my favourite book.

Egan's Quarantine had me checking out dozens of books about Quantum Mechanics while I was in High School. Love Egan's work, even if I had quite a bit of trouble with Diaspora (I probably just need to give the audiobook a second listen).

Love Diaspora, but it is really more of a philosophical thought experiment that drops you into two worlds rather than a novel with a plot. Half the book is geometry!

One of my favorite books as well. Every time I've gotten to the ending (especially the part where they discover the massive sculpture through trillions of universes) my mind is blown and I end up sitting and thinking about it for hours.

I have a similar reaction to Egan's Permutation City when the couple living in the simulation adjust the clock rate so the computer running them only executes one clock tick every second, every day, every year, every million years, every billion years, every trillion years, etc. Puts me in a contemplative mood.

But bad things happen on Earth after they coalesce. But that was in our galaxy. I guess it's just that these detected events are much farther away. Right?

Moonquakes exist too... I'd naively expect a lot less noise in space, and you don't have to worry about moon dust gumming up the works. And you can just lob three satellites up one at a time and arrange them more or less as you like, rather than having to deal with intervening geography.

The Moon also has seismic waves, albeit less than Earth. seismic waves have similar waveforms and frquencies as gravitational events. However the delays between two detectors is much larger for seismic since they propagate 50,000 times slower than gravitational waves.

terrestrial sources of gravitational waves?

Terrestrial sources of run-of-the-mill vibrations. The detector can pick up both.