LISA Pathfinder is a super-nerdy (and super-exciting) mission to test the tech that will go into building a huge gravitational wave observatory affectionately known as LISA (Laser Interferometer Space Antenna). This would consist of two spacecraft millions of kilometres apart that could pick up the teensy-tiny effects of gravitational waves between two test masses, one in each spacecraft. But in order to test the effect of the waves on the masses, they need to be in complete freefall, unaffected by any other forces. The LISA Pathfinder team showed that they could do this. “When we turned on our instrument, LISA Pathfinder, the performance was stunning,” project scientist Paul McNamara told me. “On the very first day of operation we met the LISA Pathfinder requirements, and then we set about making it better. As of now, we’re demonstrating the full performance required for a gravitational wave detector.”

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