LISA Pathfinder, a mission led by ESA (the European Space Agency) that included NASA contributions, successfully demonstrated technologies needed to build a future space-based gravitational wave observatory, a tool for detecting ripples in space-time produced by, among other things, merging black holes. A team of NASA scientists leveraged LISA Pathfinder’s record-setting sensitivity for a different purpose much closer to home—mapping microscopic dust shed by comets and asteroids.
Click here for original story, How LISA pathfinder detected dozens of ‘comet crumbs’
Source: Phys.org