Effects of Interplanetary Dust on the LISA drag-free Constellation

TL;DR

This paper investigates how interplanetary dust affects LISA spacecraft trajectories by modeling gravitational perturbations, which could help set limits on dust and dark matter densities using LISA data.

Contribution

It provides a detailed gravitational model of interplanetary dust effects on LISA orbits, extending to potential dark matter influences and data-based density constraints.

Findings

Calculated gravitational effects of ID on LISA trajectories

Integrated orbital deviations using Gauss planetary equations

Potential to constrain ID and LDM densities from LISA Doppler data

Abstract

The analysis of non-radiative sources of static or time-dependent gravitational fields in the Solar System is crucial to accurately estimate the free-fall orbits of the LISA space mission. In particular, we take into account the gravitational effects of Interplanetary Dust (ID) on the spacecraft trajectories. The perturbing gravitational field has been calculated for some ID density distributions that fit the observed zodiacal light. Then we integrated the Gauss planetary equations to get the deviations from the LISA keplerian orbits around the Sun. This analysis can be eventually extended to Local Dark Matter (LDM), as gravitational fields are expected to be similar for ID and LDM distributions. Under some strong assumptions on the displacement noise at very low frequency, the Doppler data collected during the whole LISA mission could provide upper limits on ID and LDM densities.