Related papers: A Vigorous Explorer Program
The Hubble Space Telescope has produced astonishing science over the past thirty years. Hubble's productivity can continue to soar for years to come provided some worn out components get upgraded. While powerful new ground-based and space…
This article is the written version of the closing talk presented at the conference `A Century of Cosmology' held at San Servolo, Italy, in August 2007. I focus on the prospects of constraining fundamental physics from cosmological…
With the discovery of evidence for neutrino mass, a vivid gamma ray sky at multi-TeV energies, and cosmic ray particles with unexpectedly high energies, astroparticle physics currently runs through an era of rapid progress and moving…
The great success of the Rossi X-Ray Timing Explorer (RXTE) has shown that X-ray timing is an excellent tool for the study of strong gravitational fields and the measurement of fundamental physical properties of black holes and neutron…
More than 30 years have passed since the Voyager 2 fly-bys of Uranus and Neptune. I discuss a range of lessons learned from Voyager, broadly grouped into process, planning, and people. In terms of process, we must be open to new concepts:…
The NSF's Astronomy and Astrophysics Postdoctoral Fellowship (AAPF) is exceptional among the available postdoctoral awards in Astronomy and Astrophysics. The fellowship is one of the few that allows postdoctoral researchers to pursue an…
Scientific output varies between research fields and between disciplines within a field such as astrophysics. Even in fields where publication is the primary output, there is considerable variation in publication and hence in citation…
We present the prospects for the pre-merger detection and localization of binary neutron star mergers with third generation gravitational-wave observatories. We consider a wide variety of gravitational-wave networks which may be operating…
The NASA Kepler mission has been continuously monitoring the same field of the sky since the successful launch in March 2009, providing high-quality stellar lightcurves that are excellent data for asteroseismology, far superior to any other…
Gamma-ray bursts have the potential to produce the particle energies (up to $10^{21}$ eV) and the energy budget ($10^{44} \rm{erg yr^{-1} Mpc^{-3}}$) to accommodate the spectrum of the highest energy cosmic rays; on the other hand, there is…
The Far Ultraviolet Spectroscopic Explorer (FUSE) is a NASA astronomy mission that will explore the 905-1187 A wavelength region at high spectral resolution. Funded by NASA's Explorer Program, this Origins mission is scheduled for a 1999…
In the United States, the National Science Foundation (NSF), anticipating the no growth in funding, has commissioned a review of NSF-funded astronomy assets with the goal of determining how to best allocate funding for this decade. Inputs…
The proposed US Extremely Large Telescope (ELT) Program would secure national open access to at least 25% of the observing time on the Thirty Meter Telescope in the north and the Giant Magellan Telescope in the south. ELTs would advance…
We substantially update the capabilities of the open-source software instrument Modules for Experiments in Stellar Astrophysics (MESA). MESA can now simultaneously evolve an interacting pair of differentially rotating stars undergoing…
Indian Centre for Space Physics has taken a novel strategy to study low energy cosmic rays and astrophysical X-ray sources which involve very light weight payloads up to about five kilograms on board a single or multiple balloons which are…
NASA's exoplanet Discovery mission Kepler was reconstituted as the K2 mission a year after the failure of the 2nd of Kepler's 4 reaction wheels in May 2013. The new spacecraft pointing method now gives typical roll motion of 1.0 pixels…
The most energetic neutron stars, powered by their rotation, are capable of producing pulsed radiation from the radio up to gamma rays with nearly TeV energies. These pulsars are part of the universe of energetic and powerful particle…
The Pulsar Search Collaboratory (PSC) engages high school students and teachers in analyzing real data from the Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope for the purpose of discovering exotic stars called pulsars. These cosmic clocks can be used…
High-energy gamma rays are a valuable tool for studying particle acceleration and radiation in the magnetospheres of energetic pulsars. The six or more pulsars seen by CGRO/EGRET show that: the light curves usually have double-peak…
Gamma-ray astronomy explores the most energetic photons in nature to address some of the most pressing puzzles in contemporary astrophysics. It encompasses a wide range of objects and phenomena: stars, supernovae, novae, neutron stars,…