The Effect of Mission Duration on LISA Science Objectives

Understand

The science objectives of the LISA mission have been defined under the implicit assumption of a 4 yr continuous data stream.

• Based on the performance of LISA Pathfinder, it is now expected that LISA will have a duty cycle of $\approx 0.75$, which would reduce the effective span of usable data to 3 yr.
• This paper reports the results of a study by the LISA Science Group, which was charged with assessing the additional science return of increasing the mission lifetime.
• We explore various observational scenarios to assess the impact of mission duration on the main science objectives of the mission.