Revolutionary Concept Boosts Space Mission Power by 100x

The European Space Agency (ESA) is considering a new concept for a space observatory that could improve gravitational wave (GW) sensitivity by two orders of magnitude. Known as LISAmax, this observatory would build on the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA) and could potentially make future space missions 100 times more powerful. The LISAmax observatory would be sensitive to GWs in the micro-Hertz band and could detect sources like supermassive black hole binaries thousands of years before the final merger event, allowing for a much better measurement of certain parameters. The proposal is one of several GW concepts submitted to the ESA for the Voyage 2050 program.