The European Space Agency (ESA) is getting ready to launch the Lisa Pathfinder, a satellite designed to seek out gravitational waves.
According to BBC News, the ESA will launch the satellite on a Vega rocket on a trajectory toward the sun. Lisa Pathfinder will orbit Earth from a distance of approximately 1.5 million kilometers.
The ESA announced the launch had to be delayed a day to Dec. 3 at 4:04 UTC (11:04 a.m. EST).
"With LISA Pathfinder we will demonstrate crucial technologies for future missions such as eLISA and will be one large step closer to the detection of gravitational waves from space," Karsten Danzmann, director at the Albert Einstein Institute and professor at Leibniz Universität Hannover, said in the ESA's statement.
The satellite is expected to operate for about a year, and is equipped with just a single instrument designed to detect and capture gravitational waves.
"We use the laser interferometer to bounce light between the proof masses and the optical structure that we built in Glasgow," Harry Ward, of Glasgow University in the U.K., told BBC News. "We then read out the phase of the laser beams as we recombine them, and motion of the proof mass translates into phase changes in the light - essentially, the light gets brighter or dimmer."
