Related papers: A Vigorous Explorer Program
SPACE (SPectroscopic All-sky Cosmic Explorer) is a class-M mission proposed to ESA for the Cosmic Vision 2015-2025 call and recently promoted to the next assessment study phase. SPACE will produce the first all-sky spectroscopic survey of…
THESEUS is a space mission concept aimed at exploiting Gamma-Ray Bursts for investigating the early Universe and at providing a substantial advancement of multi-messenger and time-domain astrophysics. These goals will be achieved through a…
Exoplanetary science has reached a historic moment. The James Webb Space Telescope will be capable of probing the atmospheres of rocky planets, and perhaps even search for biologically produced gases. However this is contingent on…
The next generation gravitational wave (GW) detectors -- Einstein Telescope (ET) and Cosmic Explorer (CE) will have distance horizons up to $\mathcal{O}(10)$ Gpc for detecting binary neutron star (BNS) mergers. This will make them ideal for…
Laboratory astrophysics and complementary theoretical calculations are the foundations of astronomy and astrophysics and will remain so into the foreseeable future. The mission enabling impact of laboratory astrophysics ranges from the…
Searches for millisecond pulsars (which we here loosely define as those with periods $<$ 20 ms) in the Galactic field have undergone a renaissance in the past five years. New or recently refurbished radio telescopes utilizing cooled…
The NASA Exoplanet Program Analysis Group (ExoPAG) has undertaken an effort to define mission Level 1 requirements for exoplanet direct detection missions at a range of sizes. This report outlines the science goals and requirements for the…
Having access to an exploring restart distribution (the so-called wide coverage assumption) is critical with policy gradient methods. This is due to the fact that, while the objective function is insensitive to updates in unlikely states,…
The national space programs have an historic opportunity to help solve the global-scale economic and environmental problems of Earth while becoming more effective at science through the use of space resources. Space programs will be more…
The Kepler Mission was a NASA Discovery-class mission designed to continuously monitor the brightness of at least 100,000 stars to determine the frequency of Earth-size and larger planets orbiting other stars. Once the Kepler proposal was…
The Pulsar Search Collaboratory [PSC, NSF #0737641] is a joint project between the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) and West Virginia University (WVU) designed to interest high school students in science, technology, engineering,…
We give an overview of the Galaxy Evolution Explorer (GALEX), a NASA Explorer Mission launched on April 28, 2003. GALEX is performing the first space UV sky-survey, including imaging and grism surveys in two bands (1350-1750 Angstroms and…
This is a review of neutrino astronomy anchored to the observational fact that Nature accelerates protons and photons to energies in excess of $10^{20}$ and $10^{13}$ eV, respectively. Although the discovery of cosmic rays dates back close…
Astronomy has been an inherently visual area of science for millenia, yet a majority of its significant discoveries take place in wavelengths beyond human vision. There are many people, including those with low or no vision, who cannot…
Multi-messenger astrophysics, a long-anticipated extension to traditional and multiwavelength astronomy, has recently emerged as a distinct discipline providing unique and valuable insights into the properties and processes of the physical…
The accelerating expansion of the universe is the most surprising cosmological discovery in many decades, implying that the universe is dominated by some form of "dark energy" with exotic physical properties, or that Einstein's theory of…
Fundamental changes are taking place in the way we do astronomy. In twenty years time, it is likely that most astronomers will never go near a cutting-edge telescope, which will be much more efficiently operated in service mode. They will…
Open Science has been a rising theme in the landscape of science policy in recent years. The goal is to make research that emerges from publicly funded science to become findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable (FAIR) for use by…
This article describes a set of curriculum modifications designed to integrate gravitational-wave science into a high school physics or astronomy curriculum. Gravitational-wave scientists are on the verge of being able to detect extreme…
Gravitational-wave astrophysics has the potential to be transformed by a global network of longer, colder, and thus more sensitive detectors. This network must be constructed to address a wide range of science goals, involving binary…