Stellar line-up

The success of the two major ESA projects will depend on getting spacecraft to fly in perfect formation with each other. Two of the Europe's biggest space projects are to rely on formation flying technology that will ensure the spacecraft can keep themselves aligned within nanometers, communicating with each other via lasers that are beamed across millions of miles of spaces. THese satellites have remained more or less aligned for long stretches of time has rightly been hailed by ESA as a marvelous achievement. One of these projects is the laser Interferometric Space Antenna (LISA), a joint ESA/NASA mission that aims to detect gravitational waves from the far reaches of space.