When a compact object on a highly eccentric orbit about a much more massive body passes through periapsis it emits a short gravitational wave signal known as an extreme-mass-ratio burst ( EMRB ) .
We consider stellar mass objects orbiting the massive black hole ( MBH ) found in the Galactic Centre .
EMRBs provide a novel means of extracting information about the MBH ; an EMRB from the Galactic MBH could be highly informative regarding the MBH ’ s mass and spin if the orbital periapsis is small enough .
However , to be a useful astronomical tool EMRBs must be both informative and sufficiently common to be detectable with a space-based interferometer .
We construct a simple model to predict the event rate for Galactic EMRBs .
We estimate there could be on average \sim 2 bursts in a two-year mission lifetime for LISA .
Stellar mass black holes dominate the event rate .
Creating a sample of 100 mission realisations , we calculate what we could learn about the MBH .
On average , we expect to be able to determine the MBH mass to \sim 1 \% and the spin to \sim 0.1 using EMRBs .