Related papers: Planning and Executing Airborne Astronomy Missions…
Fiber-fed spectrographs dedicated to observing massive portions of the sky are increasingly being more demanded within the astronomical community. For all the fiber-fed instruments, the primordial and common problem is the positioning of…
The sodium laser guide star adaptive optics system ALFA has been constructed at the Calar Alto 3.5-m telescope. Following the first detection of the laser beacon on the wavefront sensor in 1997 the system is now being optimized for best…
This paper presents the characterization of the in-flight beams, the beam window functions and the associated uncertainties for the Planck Low Frequency Instrument (LFI). Knowledge of the beam profiles is necessary for determining the…
A key challenge for starshades is formation flying. To successfully image exoplanets, the telescope boresight and starshade must be aligned to ~1 m at separations of tens of thousands of kilometers. This challenge has two parts: first, the…
The ultimate goal of the "Pi of the Sky" apparatus is observation of optical flashes of astronomical origin and other light sources variable on short timescales. We search mainly for optical emission of Gamma Ray Bursts, but also for…
We present the characterization and calibration of the Slow-Scan observation mode of the Far-Infrared Surveyor (FIS) onboard the AKARI satellite. The FIS, one of the two focal-plane instruments on AKARI, has four photometric bands between…
The HIFI data processing pipeline was developed to systematically process diagnostic, calibration and astronomical observations taken with the HIFI science instrumentas part of the Herschel mission. The HIFI pipeline processed data from all…
(Abridged) Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP) have resisted explanation and have received little formal scientific attention for 75 years. A primary objective of the Galileo Project is to build an integrated software and instrumentation…
The ESA Gaia mission uses two telescopes to create the most ambitious survey of the Galaxy. The angle between them must be known with exquisite precision and accuracy. An interferometer: the Basic Angle Monitoring system measures its…
This paper is the third part of a trilogy dealing with the principles, performance and limitations of what I named "Telescope-Interferometers" (TIs). The basic idea consists in transforming one telescope into a Wavefront Error (WFE) sensing…
The Solar Orbiter mission, to be launched in July 2017, will carry a suite of remote sensing and in-situ instruments, including the Polarimetric and Helioseismic Imager (PHI). PHI will deliver high-cadence images of the Sun in intensity and…
NASA's WB-57 High Altitude Research Program provides a deployable, mobile, stratospheric platform for scientific research. Airborne platforms are of particular value for making coronal observations during total solar eclipses because of…
In this paper we discuss the issue of loosing telemetry (TM) data due to different reasons (e.g. spacecraft-ground transmissions) while performing a full-sky survey with space-borne instrumentation. This is a particularly important issue…
The prediction of the antenna radiation pattern can be extremely complex for antenna system composed of several reflector surfaces. Typically, at mm-wavelengths, telescopes are composed of mirrors and shields, and an accurate prediction of…
Deeper understanding of the properties of dark energy via SNIa surveys, and to a large extent other methods as well, will require unprecedented photometric precision. Laboratory and solar photometry and radiometry regularly achieve…
The SuperNova/Acceleration Probe (SNAP) mission will require a two-meter class telescope delivering diffraction limited images spanning a one degree field in the visible and near infrared wavelength regime. This requirement, equivalent to…
The ESPRI project relies on the astrometric capabilities offered by the PRIMA facility of the Very Large Telescope Interferometer for the discovery and study of planetary systems. Our survey consists of obtaining high-precision astrometry…
The ultimate astronomical observatory would be a formation flying interferometer in space, immune to atmospheric turbulence and absorption, free from atmospheric and telescope thermal emission, and reconfigurable to adjust baselines…
OARPAF (Osservatorio Astronomico Regionale Parco Antola Comune di Fascia, Italy) hosts an 80cm Astelco telescope with a Gambato Dome, SBIG-STX camera, Davis weather station, and SBIG AllSky camera. We present a layer-structured python3…
ESA's Flyeye telescope is designed with a very large field of view (FoV) in order to scan the sky for unknown near-Earth Objects (NEOs). For typical exposure times of 40 s, the telescope is able to detect objects with a limiting magnitude…