@CascadeTommy - I've been amazed by this experiment ever since I heard about it. Back in 1999 I wrote this:
"The idea is to orbit 3 satellites in an equilateral triangle with sides 5 million kilometers long, and constantly measure the distance between them to an accuracy of a tenth of an angstrom - 10⁻¹¹ meters - using laser interferometry. The big distances would make it possible to detect gravitational waves with frequencies of .0001 to .1 hertz, much lower than the frequencies for which the ground-based detectors are optimized. The plan involves a really cool technical trick to keep the satellites from being pushed around by solar wind and the like: each satellite will have a free-falling metal cube floating inside it, and if the satellite gets pushed to one side relative to this mass, sensors will detect this and thrusters will push the satellite back on course.
I don't think LISA has been funded yet, but if all goes well, it may fly within 10 years or so. Eventually, a project called LISA 2 might be sensitive enough to detect gravitational waves left over from the early universe - the gravitational analogue of the cosmic microwave background radiation!
The microwave background radiation tells us about the universe when it was roughly 10⁵ years old, since that's when things cooled down enough for most of the hydrogen to stop being ionized, making it transparent to electromagnetic radiation. In physics jargon, that's when electromagnetic radiation "decoupled". But the gravitational background radiation would tell us about the universe when it was roughly 10⁻³⁸ seconds old, since that's when gravitational radiation decoupled."
@johncarlosbaez @CascadeTommy
My turn...WOW!