European Space Agency gives LISA the nod for a 2035 launch

This is the best summary I could come up with:

The plan is to send three spacecraft, trailing the Earth as it orbits the Sun, forming a highly accurate equilateral triangle in space.

"If we imagine that, so far, with our astrophysics missions, we have been watching the cosmos like a silent movie, capturing the ripples of spacetime with LISA will be a real game-changer, like when sound was added to motion pictures."

LISA will follow the same basic principles as the Earth-bound Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO), which first proved the existence of gravitational waves and was recently upgraded to increase its sensitivity.

LISA lead project scientist Nora Lützgendorf said, "Using laser beams over distances of several kilometers, ground-based instrumentation can detect gravitational waves coming from events involving star-sized objects – such as supernova explosions or merging of hyper-dense stars and stellar-mass black holes.

"Thanks to the huge distance travelled by the laser signals on LISA, and the superb stability of its instrumentation, we will probe gravitational waves of lower frequencies than is possible on Earth, uncovering events of a different scale, all the way back to the dawn of time."

Should all go to plan, data from LISA will be combined with other ESA missions, such as the next-generation X-ray observatory NewAthena – currently scheduled for 2037 – to give scientists a deeper insight into the origins of the Universe.

The original article contains 566 words, the summary contains 222 words. Saved 61%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!