Kelly Holley-Bockelmann

There was another funding snafu and NASA pulled out of LISA again.

And so ESA was left stranded.

So by now we had broken up with them once and ESA said, you know, we're going to have a contingency plan.

And so now we could well be breaking up with them again.

And there has been talk about

whether or not they would let us back, which I, you know, personally, I don't know if I blame them.

We've broken up with them.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I will do my best.

I always think of it like a light race.

And so in an interferometer, you will often, like LIGO, for example, you will shine a laser from one part of an instrument to another and have it bounce back.

And same for the other direction, you will laser in another direction, have it bounce back.

And if the time it takes to go from one side of the arm to another is exactly the same, then the light will interfere with each other.

And that's where the interferometer part comes in.

When the light interferes with each other, they cancel each other out and you see no signal.

But if the arm lengths are a little bit different, then it takes a little bit more or less time to go along one arm.

And so by the time the light gets back, the light doesn't perfectly interfere anymore and you get to see a little bit of light still left over.

And so that's kind of how an interferometer works.

It's a light risk.