Title: Searching for gravitational waves via Doppler tracking by future missions to Uranus and Neptune
Abstract: The past year has seen numerous studies underlining the importance of a space mission to the ice giants in the upcoming decade. Proposed mission plans involve a 10 year cruise time to the ice giants. This cruise time can be utilized to search for low-frequency gravitational waves by observing the Doppler shift caused by them in the Earth–spacecraft radio link. Analysis of the resulting Doppler shift allows to reconstruct the strain due to GWs between Earth and the spacecraft, making the Earth-satellite system an arm of a GW observatory. Furthermore, an ice giant mission would be likely scheduled for 2030s, concurrent with the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA) mission. Thus, ice giant missions combined with LISA would also improve the GW source localisation compared to LISA by itself.
Reference: Soyuer, Zwick, D’Orazio & Saha, MNRAS vol. 503, no. 1, pp. L73–L79, 2021. doi:10.1093/mnrasl/slab025 (https://arxiv.org/abs/2101.11975)