Speaker
Description
Every space mission requires extensive testing campaigns to validate the crucial
technological aspects and ensure that the key science objectives are achieved.
In our laboratory, torsion pendulums have been successfully employed to design and test the
technology for the LISA Pathfinder mission, in particular regarding the performance
of the Gravitational Reference Sensor (GRS).
Building from this heritage, we are now undertaking the task of verifying experimentally some aspects of
the LISA technology package.
Torsion pendulums are indeed invaluable tools to measure small forces and can
reproduce on ground free-falling conditions which allow testing specific disturbances on a level which is
significant also for LISA.
We will present the noise performance of our torsion pendulum, which hosts the flight-model replica of the
LISA Pathfinder GRS and a fully representative capacitive sensor readout. We will aim at explaining the noise sources that
limit our sensitivity and propose some possible upgrades.
Moreover, we will give updates on the experimental campaign aimed at testing the UV-LED Charge Management prototype
currently foreseen for LISA.
