Effect of LISA Pathfinder spacecraft self-gravity on anomalous gravitational signals near the Sun-Earth saddle point predicted by quasilinear MOND.

The possibility of sending the LISA Pathfinder spacecraft through the Sun-Earth saddle point following its nominal mission around LI has now been studied for a few years. The principal motivation for doing so is to search for anomalous gravity gradients predicted by several alternative theories of gravity. In turn, these have originally been motivated by the dark matter problem, and predict deviations from General Relativity in regions of low acceleration. All signal estimates to date have ignored the presence of the spacecraft mass distribution and its self-gravity, on the basis that the gravitational field due to Sun and Earth is larger than that due to the spacecraft itself, for any realistic saddle point fly-by distances. In this paper, we show that at least for one of the theoretical frameworks, Quasilinear Modified Newtonian Dynamics (QMOND), the presence of the local mass distribution cannot be ignored. Using simplified representations of the spacecraft mass distribution, we demonstrate that internal self-gravity, in particular internal gravitational gradients, can enhance the QMOND signals by more than 3 orders of magnitude. These preliminary results indicate that the parameter space accessible to LISA Pathfinder may be significantly larger than previously thought. We find further that the details of the matter distribution as well as of the trajectory can affect the expected signal shape, due to the coupling between internal and external gravitational fields and field gradients. We hope that this work will motivate a more comprehensive investigation of the effect, not just in QMOND, but also in the context of other theoretical frameworks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]