The time when somehow my face ended up on the cover of a video that was linked off The NY Times website

If you can’t handle the commitment of an M-dwarf, don’t even think about adopting a proton

Came here to say exactly this. Actually the Sun fits inside LISA!

Lastly, while cosmic rays are associated with AGNs, I am not aware of a specific model of cosmic ray bursts generated by MBH mergers. Like potential EM counterparts, CR counterparts could have time offsets due to both emission and propagation. Moreover, they will not have a waveform match the GW

A particle interacting with the laser beam between the spacecraft will look like an optical scattering event, which are already relatively common due to interplanetary particles and included in our error budget. A cosmic ray can of course effect our electronics, but again we plan for that.

Always good to be open to possibilities and be aware of our assumptions. In the case of cosmic rays producing signals in the LISA interferometer, I don’t think it is likely to be an issue.

I'm a scientist working on the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA), the space-based gravitational wave observatory under development by ESA and NASA.

yes

The UV discharge system is one of the components that NASA is providing to the ESA-led mission. It is being developed through a partnership with the University of Florida.

This non-contact charge control technology was demonstrated on the NASA GP-B mission and further refined on ESA's LISA Pathfinder mission. LISA will use the same basic principle, but with UV light source based on LEDs, which are smaller, lower power, and more reliable than the Hg lamps used before.

We want to keep the test masses and the surrounding spacecraft at the same electric potential so that we don't have any electrostatic forces disturbing our test masses. We do this by shining UV light on the test mass (or the housing) which strips off electrons using the photoelectric effect.

Good question. The main effect that cosmic rays have on LISA is charging of the test masses. Like you say, cosmic rays will interact with the spacecraft and produce particle showers, some of which will hit the test masses. They are not physically connected to the spacecraft, so they will charge up.