Reducing the flexing of the arms of LISA

Abstract

The joint NASA-ESA mission LISA relies crucially on the stability of the three spacecraft constellation. All three spacecraft are on heliocentric and weakly eccentric orbits forming a stable triangle. It has been shown that for certain spacecraft orbits, the arms keep constant distances to the first order in the eccentricities. However, exact orbitography shows the so-called ‘breathing modes’ of the arms where the arms slowly change their lengths over the time-scale of a year. In this paper we analyse the breathing modes (the flexing of the arms) with the help of the geodesic deviation equations to octupole order which are shown to be equivalent to higher order Clohessy-Wiltshire equations. We show that the flexing of the arms of LISA as given by the ‘exact’ solution of Keplerian orbits, which gives constant armlengths to the first order in eccentricity and whose maximum flexing amplitude is ∼ 115, 000 km, can be improved, by tilting the plane of the LISA triangle slightly from the proposed orientation of 60◦ with the ecliptic to obtain a maximum flexing amplitude of ∼ 48, 000 km, reducing it by a factor of ∼ 2.4. The reduction factor is even larger if we consider the corresponding Doppler shifts, for which the reduction factor reaches almost a factor of 6. We solve the second order equations and obtain the general solution. We then use the general solution to establish the optimality of the solutions that we have found.