GWSpace: a multi-mission science data simulator for space-based gravitational wave detection

TL;DR

GWSpace is a software package that simulates joint gravitational wave detection data from multiple space-based detectors, aiding in pre-mission data analysis and coordination.

Contribution

It introduces a comprehensive, easy-to-use simulation tool for multi-mission gravitational wave data, integrating existing open-source resources for TianQin, LISA, and TaiJi.

Findings

Simulated joint detection data for multiple missions

Demonstrated application examples of the package

Utilized a common coordinate system for all missions

Abstract

Space-based gravitational wave detectors such as TianQin, LISA, and TaiJi have the potential to outperform themselves through joint observation. To achieve this, it is desirable to practice joint data analysis in advance on simulated data that encodes the intrinsic correlation among the signals found in different detectors that operate simultaneously. In this paper, we introduce GWSpace, a package that can simulate the joint detection data from TianQin, LISA, and TaiJi. The software is not a groundbreaking work that starts from scratch. Rather, we use as many open-source resources as possible, tailoring them to the needs of simulating the multi-mission science data and putting everything into a ready-to-go and easy-to-use package. We shall describe the main components, the construction, and a few examples of application of the package. A common coordinate system, namely the Solar System Barycenter (SSB) coordinate system, is utilized to calculate spacecraft orbits for all three missions. The paper also provides a brief derivation of the detection process and outlines the general waveform of sources detectable by these detectors.