Being announced as the discovery of the decade (sucks to work in science for the next 4 years I guess) the recent announcement of the discovery of gravitational waves from the collision of two black holes seems to usurp the eLISA mission entirely. Is the hope that the eLISA mission can do more accurate or finer measurements? May the mission be scrapped?
I considered putting this on Physics stack exchange but it seems part of the answer will be about the satellite funding etc.
The scientific method require experimental results to be confirmed by other researchers. Even though LIGO has detected gravitational waves, that is still a weak theory until others can reproduce the experiment. Ideally, you also want another detection method to be substantially different from previous experiments, in order to confirm the hypothesis.
Given that the LPF is already launched, I doubt that it will be cancelled. I expect quite the contrary, eLISA is a perfect opportunity to do the confirmation of the results found by the LIGO team, and will gain more public interest from the recent news.
