University of Glasgow's LISA Pathfinder team has been awarded The Arthur C. Clarke Foundation and the British Interplanetary Society's 2016 Sir Arthur Clarke Award for "Space Achievement in Academic Research or Study".
SUPA’s own Dr Christian Killow, who is part of the team and who attended the Awards Ceremony at the Reinventing Space Conference Gala Dinner in the Royal Society in London on Thursday 27 October 2016, said;
LISA Pathfinder has been incredibly successful since its launch in December 2015. The demonstration of the measurement principles for a spaceborne gravitational wave observatory have enthused the international community of scientists and engineers as they prepare a bid to the European Space Agency call for mission concepts for its third Large Class mission, which has the science theme "the Gravitational Universe".
The optical bench - the measurement heart of LISA Pathfinder - has shown exemplary performance. Designing, constructing and testing the optical bench was a hugely challenging task, and the Glasgow team were delighted to have a decade of hard work recognised. The focus now is on extracting maximum benefit from the prior work and extending it to meet the new challenges of building a multi-million kilometre spaceborne observatory to access to the low frequency gravitational wave spectrum, and the rich science that this will deliver.
The University of Glasgow press release can be found here: http://www.gla.ac.uk/news/headline_498623_en.html
More information about the British Planetary Society and the Sir Arthur Clarke awards can be found here: http://www.bis-space.com/2016/11/01/17995/winners-of-the-sir-arthur-cla…