LISA Pathfinder Platform Stability and Drag-free Performance
Creators: name: Armano, Michele
name: Audley, Heather
name: Baird, Jonathon
name: Binetruy, Pierre
name: Born, Michael
name: Bortoluzzi, Daniele
name: Castelli, Eleanora
name: Cavalleri, Antonella
name: Cesarini, Andrea
name: Cruise, Mike
name: Danzmann, Karsten
name: Silva, Marcus de Deus
name: Diepholz, Igo
name: Dixon, George
name: Dolesi, Rita
name: Ferraioli, Luigi
name: Ferroni, Valerio
name: Fitzsimons, Ewan
name: Freschi, Mario
name: Gesa, Luis
name: Gibert, Ferran
name: Giardini, Domenico
name: Giusteri, Roberta
name: Grimani, Catia
name: Grzymisch, Jonathan
name: Harrison, Ian
name: Heinzel, Gerhard
name: Hewitson, Martin
name: Hollington, Daniel
name: Hoyland, David
name: Hueller, Mauro
name: Inchauspe, Henri
name: Jennrich, Oliver
name: Jetzer, Philippe
name: Karnesis, Nikolaos
name: Kaune, Brigitte
name: Korsakova, Natalia
name: Killow, Christian J
name: Lobo, Alberto
name: Lloro, Ivan
name: Liu, Li
name: Lopez-Zaragoza, Juan-Pedro P
name: Maarschalkerweerd, Rolf
name: Mance, Davor
name: Meshksar, Neda
name: Martın, V
name: Martin-Polo, L
name: Martino, Joseph
name: Martin-Porqueras, Fernando
name: Mateos, Ignacio
name: McNamara, Paul
name: Mendes, Jose
name: Mendes, Luis
name: Nofrarias, Miquel
name: Paczkowski, Sarah
name: Perreur-Lloyd, Michael
name: Petiteau, Antoine
name: Pivato, Paolo
name: Plagnol, Eric
name: Ramos-Castro, Jose
name: Reiche, Jens
name: Robertson, David
name: Rivas, Francisco
name: Russano, Giuliana
name: Slutsky, Jacob
name: Sopuerta, Carlos
name: Sumner, Timothy
name: Texier, Daniel
name: Thorpe, Ira
name: Vetrugno, Daniele
name: Vitale, Stefano
name: Wanner, Gudrun
name: Ward, Harry
name: Wass, Peter
name: Weber, William
name: Wissel, Lennart
name: Wittchen, Andreas
name: Zweifel, Peter
Publisher: name: arXiv
Year: 2018
Subjects: subject: Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics (astro-ph.IM)
subject: FOS: Physical sciences
subject: FOS: Physical sciences

description: The science operations of the LISA Pathfinder mission has demonstrated the feasibility of sub-femto-g free-fall of macroscopic test masses necessary to build a LISA-like gravitational wave observatory in space. While the main focus of interest, i.e. the optical axis or the $x$-axis, has been extensively studied, it is also of interest to evaluate the stability of the spacecraft with respect to all the other degrees of freedom. The current paper is dedicated to such a study, with a focus set on an exhaustive and quantitative evaluation of the imperfections and dynamical effects that impact the stability with respect to its local geodesic. A model of the complete closed-loop system provides a comprehensive understanding of each part of the in-loop coordinates spectra. As will be presented, this model gives very good agreements with LISA Pathfinder flight data. It allows one to identify the physical noise source at the origin and the physical phenomena underlying the couplings. From this, the performances of the stability of the spacecraft, with respect to its geodesic, are extracted as a function of frequency. Close to $1 mHz$, the stability of the spacecraft on the $X_{SC}$, $Y_{SC}$ and $Z_{SC}$ degrees of freedom is shown to be of the order of $5.0\ 10^{-15} m\ s^{-2}/\sqrt{Hz}$ for X and $4.0 \ 10^{-14} m\ s^{-2}/\sqrt{Hz}$ for Y and Z. For the angular degrees of freedom, the values are of the order $3\ 10^{-12} rad\ s^{-2}/\sqrt{Hz}$ for $Θ_{SC}$ and $3\ 10^{-13} rad\ s^{-2}/\sqrt{Hz}$ for $H_{SC}$ and $Φ_{SC}$.
description: 16 pages, 10 figures