On Wednesday, the agency showed off its mock-ups of the LISA spacecraft, called the Engineering Development Unit Telescope. Ryan DeRosa, a researcher at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, explained in an accompanying statement that the “prototype… will guide us as we work toward building the flight hardware.”

NASA has revealed a full-scale prototype of the telescope that will be used in the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA) mission, a collaborative effort between NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) aimed at detecting gravitational waves from space.

LISA mission will be the “first gravitational wave detector in space” and will “explore the fundamental nature of gravity and black holes”. How will LISA detect ripples in spacetime? Why to study Gravitational Waves?