Related papers: Learning from Galileo's errors
Astrometric positions of moving objects in the Solar System have been measured using a variety of star catalogs in the past. Previous work has shown that systematic errors in star catalogs can affect the accuracy of astrometric…
Compact object binaries (a black hole or a neutron star orbiting a non-degenerate stellar companion) are key to our understanding of late massive star evolution, in addition to being some of the best probes of extreme gravity and accretion…
The advancement in the world of global satellite systems has enhanced the accuracy and reliability between various constellations. However, these enhancements have made numerous challenges for the receivers designer. For instance, comparing…
We present astrometric observations of the Saturnian satellites Mimas, Enceladus, Tethys, Dione and Rhea from Cassini Imaging Science Subsystem (ISS) narrow-angle camera (NAC) images. Image sequences were designed to observe mutual…
In this work, an attempt is presented to understand the contribution of Galileo Galilei in the field of the History of Ideas, from the moment he points a spyglass to the sky. For that, it was previously necessary that Giotto painting the…
Janus and Epimetheus are famously known for their distinctive horseshoe-shaped orbits resulting from a 1:1 orbital resonance. Every four years these two satellites swap their orbits by a few tens of kilometers as a result of their close…
All experiments to date are in remarkable agreement with the predictions of Einstein's theory of gravity, General Relativity. Besides the classical tests, involving light deflection, orbit precession, signal delay, and the gravitational…
This document lists a set of (refereed and unrefereed) scientific publications based on data taken with the instruments of the Italian Telescopio Nazionale Galileo (TNG, mainly from the year 2000 onward) and the technical papers describing…
Lunar laser ranging has provided many of the best tests of gravitation since the first Apollo astronauts landed on the Moon. The march to higher precision continues to this day, now entering the millimeter regime, and promising continued…
Astronomy is in an era where all-sky surveys are mapping the Galaxy. The plethora of photometric, spectroscopic, asteroseismic and astrometric data allows us to characterise the comprising stars in detail. Here we quantify to what extent…
The Lunar Laser Ranging (LLR) experiment has accumulated 50 years of range data of improving accuracy from ground stations to the laser retroreflector arrays (LRAs) on the lunar surface. The upcoming decade offers several opportunities to…
Quasars are often considered to be point-like objects. This is largely true and allows for an excellent alignment of the optical positional reference frame of the ongoing ESA mission Gaia with the International Celestial Reference Frame.…
The Gaia spacecraft has just released a large set of parallaxes, including 41 novae for which the fractional error is <30%. I have used these to evaluate the accuracy and bias of the many prior methods for getting nova-distances. The best…
The Gaia mission started its regular observing program in the summer of 2014, and since then it is regularly obtaining observations of asteroids. This paper draws the outline of the data processing for Solar System objects, and in…
Context. The Gaia ESA mission will estimate the astrometric and physical data of more than one billion objects, providing the largest and most precise catalog of absolute astrometry in the history of Astronomy. The core of this process, the…
The unexpected finding of a ring system around the Centaur (10199) Chariklo opened a new window for dynamical studies and posed many questions about the formation and evolutionary mechanisms of Centaurs as well as the relationship to…
This is a historian's view of how modern astronomy data can be used to discuss the shifting historical worldview of Late Antiquity. In this article an attemp is made to construct an approximate model of how the cycles of astronomical…
The Galileo Project is the first systematic scientific research program in search for potential astro8 archaeological artifacts or remnants of extraterrestrial technological civilizations (ETCs) or potentially active equipment near Earth.…
Several planetary satellites apparently have subsurface seas that are of great interest for, among other reasons, their possible habitability. The geologically diverse Saturnian satellite Enceladus vigorously vents liquid water and vapor…
Geometric distortion (GD) critically constrains the precision of astrometry. Using well-established methods to correct GD requires calibration observations, which can only be obtained using a special dithering strategy during the…