Pre-Phase A Report - Lisa - Nasa

Chapter 10
International Collaboration,
Management, Schedules, Archiving
10.1 International collaboration
LISA is envisaged as a NASA/ESA collaborative project in an equal partnering arrangement.
This allows both space agencies to participate in this project at moderate cost and
also reflects the contributions to the payload and mission design made by the scientific
community in the USA and in Europe and by the two space agencies.
Much of the early development work of the LISA payload and project was carried out
in the US (then known as the LAGOS project, for details see Section 2.6), while more
recently most of the work was done in Europe: study of a 4-spacecraft LISA mission at
assessment level in 1993/94 including an in-depth trade-off between the geocentric and
the heliocentric option, selection of a 6-spacecraft LISA mission as a cornerstone project
in 1995, detailed payload definition and design in 1997/98 and industrial study at Phase A
level in 1999.
In early 1997, NASA supported a short LISA study by JPL’s Team-X, based on three
spacecraft and ion drive propulsion which led to a significant mass and cost reduction
(from 6.8 t launch mass and about 800 MECU for the 6-spacecraft configuration excluding
the payload to 1.4 t launch mass and $ 465 M for the 3-spacecraft configuration including
the ion drives, launch vehicle, operations and payload). Towards the end of 1997, NASA
decided to form a LISA Pre-Project Office at JPL and in March 1998 to set up a LISA
Mission Definition Team.
Currently, both ESA and NASA studies of the LISA mission proceed in parallel, with partial
team membership overlap to ensure maximum commonality between the two studies.
From the very beginning, the LISA team consisted of US and European scientists working
very closely together and it is difficult for the international LISA team to imagine that
LISA could be carried out in any other way than in collaboration between ESA and NASA.
The original proposal of the LISA Project by an international team of scientists to ESA in
May 1993 suggested a NASA/ESA collaborative project. Furthermore, in February 1997,
ESA’s Fundamental Physics Advisory Group (FPAG) strongly recommended to carry out
LISA in collaboration with NASA and suggested that “this collaboration should be put in
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