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The Pandora SmallSat is a NASA flight project aimed at studying the atmospheres of exoplanets -- planets orbiting stars outside our Solar System. Pandora will provide the first dataset of simultaneous, multiband (visible and NIR),…
Among highly irradiated exoplanets, some have been found to undergo significant hydrodynamic expansion traced by atmospheric escape. To better understand these processes in the context of planetary evolution, we propose NIGHT (the…
High energy neutrinos produced in astrophysical processes will allow for a new way of studying the universe. In order to detect the expected flux of high energy neutrinos from specific astrophysical sources, neutrino telescopes of a scale…
Euclid is a space telescope currently developed in the framework of the ESA Cosmic Vision 2015-2025 Program. It addresses fundamental cosmological questions related to dark matter and dark energy. The lens system of one of the two…
The NEAT (Nearby Earth Astrometric Telescope) mission is a proposal submitted to ESA for its 2010 call for M-size mission within the Cosmic Vision 2015-2025 plan. The main scientific goal of the NEAT mission is to detect and characterize…
(abridged) A complete census of planetary systems around a volume-limited sample of solar-type stars (FGK dwarfs) in the Solar neighborhood with uniform sensitivity down to Earth-mass planets within their Habitable Zones out to several AUs…
IRAC excels at detecting distant objects. Due to a combination of the shapes of the spectral energy distributions of galaxies and the low background achieved from space, IRAC reaches greater depth in comparable exposure time at 3.6 and 4.5…
We describe the scientific motivations, the mission concept and the instrumentation of SPACE, a class-M mission proposed for concept study at the first call of the ESA Cosmic-Vision 2015-2025 planning cycle. SPACE aims to produce the…
ASTEP South is the first phase of the ASTEP project that aims to determine the quality of Dome C as a site for future photometric searches for transiting exoplanets and discover extrasolar planets from the Concordia base in Antarctica.…
The IceCube collaboration has built an in-ice neutrino telescope and a surface detector array, IceTop, at the South Pole. Over 5000 digital optical modules have been deployed in a cubic kilometer of ice between 1450 and 2450 m below the…
The SPace Infrared telescope for Cosmology and Astrophysics (SPICA) is a proposed mid-to-far infrared (4-200 um) astronomy mission, scheduled for launch in 2017. A single, 3.5m aperture telescope would provide superior image quality at…
Remote sensing observations suffer significant limitations when used to study the bulk atmospheric composition of the giant planets of our solar system. This impacts our knowledge of the formation of these planets and the physics of their…
Dome C in Antarctica is a promising site for photometric observations thanks to the continuous night during the Antarctic winter and favorable weather conditions. We developed instruments to assess the quality of this site for photometry in…
Recent investigations have demonstrated the potential for utilizing a new observational and data analysis technique for studying the atmospheres of non-transiting exoplanets with combined light that relies on acquiring simultaneous,…
A prototype system for the Permanent All Sky Survey (PASS) project is presented. PASS is a continuous photometric survey of the entire celestial sphere with a high temporal resolution. Its major objectives are the detection of all…
The study of extrasolar planets has rapidly expanded to encompass the search for new planets, measurements of sizes and masses, models of planetary interiors, planetary demographics and occurrence frequencies, the characterization of…
Balloon-borne astronomy is a unique tool that allows for a level of image stability and significantly reduced atmospheric interference without the often prohibitive cost and long development time-scale that are characteristic of space-borne…
PLATO (PLAnetary Transits and Oscillations of stars) is ESA's M3 mission designed to detect and characterise extrasolar planets and perform asteroseismic monitoring of a large number of stars. PLATO will detect small planets (down to <2…
Observations that require large physical instrument dimensions and/or a considerable amount of cryogens, as it is for example the case for high spatial resolution far infrared astronomy, currently still face technological limits for their…
The investigation of the emergence of life is a major endeavour of science. Astronomy is contributing to it in three fundamental manners: (1) by measuring the chemical enrichment of the Universe, (2) by investigating planet formation and…