Alas, they depart so swiftly

[FringeMantra]

Well it's not a planet survey mission but the successor to the LISA pathfinder mission is about to step up to the plate.

Lisa completed its mission and was deactivated 2 months ago but she demonstrated the feasibility of space based laser interferometers for gravitational wave observatories.

https://www.nature.com/news/success-...ission-1.22205

"The LISA Pathfinder mission, launched in late 2015, beat its precision target by a factor of 1,000" lulz
"it showed that it could detect motions 100 times smaller than the pico-metre requirement. Since then, the experiment’s performance has improved by another order of magnitude."

The technology setup involved is pretty crazy.



the Billion EURO succesor mission was recently greenlit and would consist out of a constellation of three similar spacecraft, arranged in an equilateral triangle with sides 2.5 million km long, flying along an Earth-like heliocentric orbit.

It's similar to earth based gravitational wave observatories but with, obviously much longer arms, and precision so stunning it would allow us to map the minute business of our local and not so local heavy weights.