Abstract
We are developing a pointing sensor as part of the technlogy development effort for the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA) mission. The sensor will measure the angle between two beams, by measuring the phase difference in the heterodyne frequency on different sides of the pupil plane. In LISA, one beam would be from the local laser, while the other beam comes from a different spaceraft. The beam coming from the other space ccraft will have a Doppler shift due to changes in the orbits of the satellites. The phase difference across the aperture will be measured to align the incoming and outgoing beams. We have characterized our pointing noise levels due to electronics over bandwidths of 0.001 to 1 Hz with a heterodyne frequency of 5 MHz. The LISA pointing requirements is on the order of 10 nrad/square root Hz stability on the sky, with a worst case scenario of 1 nrad/square root Hz. We present our first results, in which we have reached 4 micro-radians/square root Hz on the detector. This is equivalent to 70 nrad/square root Hz for LISA.
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