Texas A&M Astrophysicist Krista Smith Named To ESA-NASA Science Team

Dr. Krista Lynne Smith, an associate professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Texas A&M University, has been selected by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Astrophysics Division to serve on the joint European Space Agency (ESA)-NASA Science Team for the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA) mission, which is set to begin searching for gravitational wave signatures in space within the next decade.

Smith, an observational astrophysicist who studies supermassive black holes, is one of six U.S. scientists announced June 24 as members of the LISA Science Team tasked with providing scientific stewardship for the mission while also serving as ambassadors between the agencies and the scientific community.

According to NASA, Smith and her fellow US representatives will join 11 European scientists selected by ESA through an open call along with two interdisciplinary scientists and a representative from the LISA Consortium to the LISA Science Team. The team will be co-chaired by the ESA and NASA LISA Project Scientists. The full membership of the team will be announced by ESA later this summer.

The LISA mission was recently adopted into ESA’s flight program and is targeted for launch in 2035. The ambitious space-based gravitational wave observatory will detect gravitational waves in space using lasers fired between three spacecraft, separated by more than a million miles and flying in a triangular formation, to measure how gravitational waves alter their relative distances. During its 4.5 year nominal mission, LISA will observe gravitational waves in the millihertz band as generated by compact binary systems, merging supermassive black holes and other exotic phenomena.

This story source was originally published by Texas A&M Arts & Sciences.