Time delay interferometry with moving spacecraft arrays

Space-borne interferometric gravitational wave detectors, sensitive in the low-frequency (millihertz) band, will fly in the next decade. In these detectors the spacecraft-to-spacecraft light-travel-times will necessarily be unequal, time varying, and (due to aberration) have different time delays on up and down links. The reduction of data from moving interferometric laser arrays in solar orbit will in fact encounter nonsymmetric up- and down-link light time differences that are about 100 times larger than has previously been recognized. The time-delay interferometry (TDI) technique uses knowledge of these delays to cancel the otherwise dominant laser phase noise and yields a variety of data combinations sensitive to gravitational waves. Under the assumption that the (different) up- and down-link time delays are constant, we derive the TDI expressions for those combinations that rely only on four interspacecraft phase measurements. We then turn to the general problem that encompasses time dependence of the light-travel times along the laser links. By introducing a set of noncommuting time-delay operators, we show that there exists a quite general procedure for deriving generalized TDI combinations that account for the effects of time dependence of the arms. By applying our approach we are able to re-derive the “flex-free” expression for the unequal-arm Michelson combinations X₁, and obtain the generalized expressions for the TDI combinations called relay, beacon, monitor, and symmetric Sagnac.