NASA and ESA Spacecraft to Conduct Massive Experiment With Lasers

NASA and ESA are planning to launch three spacecraft into orbit around the sun some three million miles apart, and then have them shoot lasers at each other, Popular Science reports.

You may want to stop for a moment and just bask in the coolness of that idea. Back yet? The purpose of this project will be to prove one last part of Einstein's theory of relativity: the existence of gravitational waves, or "huge ripples in time and space that flow outwards from the collision of huge celestial bodies like black holes," as the report said.

To do this, NASA and ESA will deploy LISA, the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna; it consists of three spacecraft that will fire lasers at each other and measure the relative positions of floating cubes of gold and platinum alloy--with a precision of 40 millionths of a millionth of a meter.

The project is set for launch in 2020.