Netherlands to build laser pointer for ESA black hole space mission

The Netherlands Organisation for Applied Scientific Research (TNO) has been granted €1.39mn to finish development of its high-precision laser targeting mechanism. This will support one of ESA’s most ambitious missions: tracing and studying black holes with the aim of unraveling the history of the universe — humanity’s most challenging puzzle. Specifically, ESA’s so-called LISA will be the first space-based observatory designed to study gravitational waves. These are ripples in the space-time continuum that occur during the most powerful cosmic events, such as pairs of supermassive black holes merging or colliding. In recent years, Earth-based observatories have been able to detect…

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