Near-Perfect Free Fall in Space Sets Stage for Gravitational Wave Hunt

A European space mission has achieved the closest thing to a true free fall ever observed for a human-created object, demonstrating the technology needed to build a future observatory that will hunt for gravitational waves far from Earth, scientists said. The two gold-platinum cubes inside the European Space Agency's (ESA) LISA Pathfinder spacecraft are virtually motionless with respect to each other, with a relative acceleration equivalent to the weight of a virus here on Earth, mission team me