Pre-Phase A Report - Lisa - Nasa

176 Collaboration, Management, Schedules, Archiving
place as soon as possible”. Also in February 1997, ESA’s LISA Study Team clearly stated
that “the LISA mission should be carried out in collaboration with NASA.” It is assumed
that ESA and NASA will explore the possibilities of a collaboration after completion of
ESA’s industrial study, at a time when the feasibility and the cost of the LISA mission
are better known.
Considering that a Delta II class launch vehicle is sufficient to launch the three LISA
spacecraft and that a launch vehicle of that class does not exist in Europe (only the
much bigger Ariane 5) it would be natural to assume that NASA would provide the
launch vehicle in such a collaboration. It would also make sense for NASA to provide the
mission and science operations using their Deep Space Network (DSN). ESA would then
provide the three spacecraft, presumably including the ion drives. To ensure compatibility
with the DSN the telecommunications system will use Ka-band transmission with the
telecommunications system hardware on board the spacecraft provided by NASA. Insuch
an “equal sharing scenario”, NASA would provide 50 % of the payload while European
institutes funded nationally would provide the other 50 %. In this scenario the cost to
ESA should be < 175 MECU.
Possible other candidates for cooperation in the LISA mission could be Japan and Australia,
where there are active communities interested in ground-based detection of gravitational
waves. Discussions with individual scientists in these countries have taken place
which may lead to a collaboration at a later time, presumably at a lower level of investment
than the two main partners NASA and ESA.
After approval of the LISA project by NASA and ESA, a Memorandum of Understanding
(MoU) and a Program Plan (PP) would be prepared jointly by NASA and ESA. The
MoU would define the agreement made between NASA and ESA for the implementation
of the LISA project. It would contain, inter alia, agreements, responsibilities and deliverable
items. The PP is the highest level Project document which defines the objectives,
requirements, organization, and management structure of the project.
10.2 Science and project management
The proposed procurement scheme for LISA is based on the concept that the payload will
be provided by Principal Investigators (PIs) with funding from ESA’s Member States as far
as European contributions are concerned, and from NASA for possible US contributions.
Payload selection would be based on proposals that would be submitted to NASA and ESA
in response to a single joint NASA/ESA Announcement of Opportunity (AO). Payload
elements would be selected competitively by a joint NASA/ESA selection committee after
a parallel scientific and technical evaluation of the proposals.
After selection of the payload a LISA Science Working Team would be formed, comprising
the US and European PIs, the NASA and ESA Project Managers and Project Scientists
and the Experiment Manager. Nationally funded payload subsystems such as lasers,
optical bench, telescope, accelerometer, and structure, will be constructed at PI institutes.
One institute would perform the overall management, integration, and testing of the
payload under the responsibility of the Experiment Manager who would be the singlepoint
interface to the ESA Project Manager.
3-3-1999 9:33 Corrected version 2.08