Telescope jitters and phase noise in the LISA interferometer

The Laser Interferometer Space Antenna aims to measure picometer changes of the 2.5 × 10^6 km sides of a triangular constellation of satellites. Each spacecraft hosts two telescopes that simultaneously transmit and receive laser beams measuring the constellation arms by heterodyning the received wavefronts with local references. We report an end-to-end investigation of the measurement noise due to the interaction between the telescope jitters and wavefront aberrations. With provisional design parameters, to achieve the targeted sensitivity the root-mean-square aberrations must be less than λ/65.