L3Harris Wins NASA Contract for All-Glass LISA Test Telescope
Article excerpt
Highlighted: the sentence this signal was extracted from
L3Harris Technologies (LHX) has been selected by NASA to design, assemble, integrate, and test an all-glass telescope for the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA) mission, the company announced on October 8, 2026. In an article published the same day, NASA identified the unit as the Engineering Development Unit and described it as a final step toward the future production of flight hardware for the gravitational-wave observatory led by the European Space Agency. "We have put the prototype through rigorous testing and are rolling everything we learned into this new telescope," said Ritva Keski-Kuha, LISA telescope program manager at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. "This will be our last pre-flight unit and our first optical telescope delivery to ESA." NASA indicated that the team delivered a structural model of the telescope made of metal rather than glass in June 2026. According to L3Harris's announcement, the mission aims to detect gravitational waves in space by measuring distance variations between satellites using laser beams, supporting the study of black holes, colliding stars, and spacetime. The mission will deploy three satellites in a heliocentric orbit, forming a triangular constellation stretching 2.5 million kilometers to measure distance variations smaller than the width of a single atom. Each satellite will carry two L3Harris telescopes capable of...
Keep reading with a free account
The rest of this article, and every signal for L3Harris, is in your free account.
