MYSTERIES OF THE EQUILATERAL TRIANGLE - HIKARI Ltd

84 Applications
(a)
Figure 3.9: (a) LISA (Laser Interferometer Space Antenna). (b) The LISA
Constellation’s Heliocentric Orbit. [117]
Application 9 (LISA and Gravitational Waves). Launching in 2020 at
the earliest, LISA (Laser Interferometer Space Antenna) [117] will overtake
the Large Hadron Collider as the world’s largest scientific instrument.
Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity predicts the presence of gravitational
waves produced by massive objects, such as black holes and neutron
stars, but they are believed to be so weak that they have yet to be detected.
This joint project of ESA and NASA to search for gravitational waves will
consist of three spacecraft arranged in an equilateral triangle, 5 million kilometers
(3.1 million miles or 1/30 of the distance to the Sun) on each side, that
will tumble around the Sun 20 ◦ behind Earth in its orbit (Figure 3.9(a)). The
natural free-fall orbits of the three spacecraft around the Sun will maintain this
triangular formation. The plane of the LISA triangle will be inclined at 60 ◦
to the ecliptic, and the triangle will appear to rotate once around its center in
the course of a year’s revolution around the Sun (Figure 3.9(b)). Each spacecraft
will house a pair of free-floating cubes made of a gold-platinum alloy and
the distance between the cubes in different spacecraft will be monitored using
highly accurate laser-based techniques. In this manner, it will be possible to
detect minute changes to the separation of the spacecraft caused by passing
gravitational waves.
Application 10 (Ionocraft (“Lifter”)). An ionocraft or ion-propelled aircraft
(a.k.a. “Lifter”) is an electrohydrodynamic (EHD) device which utilizes
an electrical phenomenon known as the Biefeld-Brown effect to produce thrust
in the air, without requiring combustion or moving parts [101].
The basics of such ion air propulsion were established by T. T. Brown in
1928 and were further developed into the ionocraft by Major A. P. de Seversky
(b)