The First Round Result from the TianQin-1 Satellite

Jun Luo, Yanzheng Bai, Lin Cai, Bin Cao, Wei-Ming Chen, Yu Chen, De-Cong Chen, Yan-Wei Ding, Huizong Duan, Xingyu Gou, Chao-Zheng Gu, De-Feng Gu, Zi-Qi He, Shuang Hu, Yuexin Hu, Xiang-Qing Huang, Qinghua Jiang, Yuan-Ze Jiang, Honggang Li, Hong-Yin Li, Jia Li, Ming Li, Zhu Li, Zhu-Xi Li, Yu-Rong Liang, Fang-Jie Liao, Yan-Chong Liu, Li Liu, Pei-Bo Liu, Xuhui Liu, Yuan Liu, Xiong-Fei Lu, Yan Luo, Jian-Wei Mei, Min Ming, Shao-Bo Qu, Ding-Yin Tan, Mi Tang, Liangcheng Tu*, Cheng-Rui Wang, Fengbin Wang, Guan-Fang Wang, Jian Wang, Lijiao Wang, Xudong Wang, Ran Wei, Shuchao Wu, Chun-Yu Xiao, Meng-Zhe Xie, Xiao-Shi Xu, Liang Yang, Ming-Lin Yang, Shan-Qing Yang, Hsien-Chi Yeh*, Jian-Bo Yu, Lihua Zhang*, Meng-Hao Zhao and Zebing Zhou*

Abstract: The TianQin-1 satellite (TQ-1), which is the first technology demonstration satellite for the TianQin project, was launched on 20 December 2019. The first round of experiment had been carried out from 21 December 2019 until 1 April 2020. The residual acceleration of the satellite is found to be about 1 × 10^-10 m/s² /Hz^1/2 at 0.1 Hz and about 5×10^-11 m/s ²/Hz^1/2 at 0.05 Hz, measured by an inertial sensor with a sensitivity of 5×10^-12 m/s ²/Hz^1/2 at 0.1 Hz. The micro-Newton thrusters has demonstrated a thrust resolution of 0.1μN and a thrust noise of 0.3μN/Hz^1/2 at 0.1 Hz. The residual noise of the satellite with drag-free control is 3×10^-9 m/s ²/Hz^1/2 at 0.1 Hz. The noise level of the optical readout system is about 30 pm/Hz^1/2 at 0.1 Hz. The temperature stability at temperature monitoring position is controlled to be about ±3 mK per orbit, and the mismatch between the center-of-mass of the satellite and that of the test mass is measured with a precision of better than 0.1 mm.