Related papers: LOFT: the Large Observatory for X-ray Timing
PLAnetary Transits and Oscillations of stars (PLATO) is an ESA M-class mission to be launched by the end of 2026 to discover and characterize transiting planets around bright and nearby stars, and in particular habitable rocky planets…
The Gravitational-wave Optical Transient Observer (GOTO) is a wide-field telescope project focused on detecting optical counterparts to gravitational-wave sources. GOTO uses arrays of 40 cm unit telescopes (UTs) on a shared robotic mount,…
The EXTraS project (Exploring the X-ray Transient and variable Sky) will characterise the temporal behaviour of the largest ever sample of objects in the soft X-ray range (0.1-12 keV) with a complex, systematic and consistent analysis of…
SIMBOL-X is a hard X-ray mission, operating in the ~ 0.5-70 keV range, which is proposed by a consortium of European laboratories in response to the 2004 call for ideas of CNES for a scientific mission to be flown on a formation flying…
We present the cosmological and astrophysical objectives of the SPOrt mission, which is scheduled for flying on the International Space Station (ISS) in the year 2002 with the purpose of measuring the diffuse sky polarized radiation in the…
High Time Resolution Astrophysics (HTRA) concerns itself with observations on short scales normally defined as being lower than the conventional read-out time of a CCD. As such it is concerned with condensed objects such as neutron stars,…
The European Pulsar Timing Array (EPTA) is a multi-institutional, multi-telescope collaboration, with the goal of using high-precision pulsar timing to directly detect gravitational waves. In this article we discuss the EPTA member…
Euclid is a space-based optical/near-infrared survey mission of the European Space Agency (ESA) to investigate the nature of dark energy, dark matter and gravity by observing the geometry of the Universe and on the formation of structures…
The European Space Agency (ESA), driven by its ambitions on planned lunar missions with the Argonaut lander, has a profound interest in reliable crater detection, since craters pose a risk to safe lunar landings. This task is usually…
We discuss how future X-ray instruments which are under development can contribute to our understanding of the non-thermal Universe. Much progress has been made in the field of X-ray Astronomy recently, thanks to the operation of modern…
Thanks to high-resolution and non-dispersive spectrometers onboard future X-ray missions such as XRISM and Athena, we are finally poised to answer important questions about the formation and evolution of galaxies and large-scale structure.…
XEUS has been recently selected by ESA for an assessment study. XEUS is a large mission candidate for the Cosmic Vision program, aiming for a launch date as early as 2018. XEUS is a follow-on to ESA's Cornerstone X-Ray Spectroscopy Mission…
The Sky Polarization Observatory is an experiment selected by ESA for the Early Opportunity Phase onboard the International Space Station. SPOrt is the first payload specifically designed for polarization measurements, it will provide near…
The success of the SWIFT/BAT and INTEGRAL missions has definitely opened a new window for follow-up and deep study of the transient gamma-ray sky. This now appears as the access key to important progresses in the area of cosmological…
Biophotonics is an active research area in molecular imaging, genetic diagnosis and prognosis, with direct applicability in precision medicine. However, long-standing challenges of biophotonics are well known due to low signal-to-noise…
The Lobster Eye X-ray Telescope (LEXT) is one of the payloads on-board the Gamow Explorer, which will be proposed to the 2021 NASA Explorer MIDEX opportunity. If approved, it will be launched in 2028, and is optimised to identify high-z…
LiteBIRD has been selected as JAXA's strategic large mission in the 2020s, to observe the cosmic microwave background (CMB) $B$-mode polarization over the full sky at large angular scales. The challenges of LiteBIRD are the wide…
IAU Symposium 232 allows a snapshot of ELTs at a stage when design work in several critical mass projects has been seriously underway for two to three years. The status and som eof the main initial design choices are reviewed for the North…
The Fermi Gamma-Ray Space Telescope, successfully launched on June 11th, 2008, is the next generation satellite experiment for high-energy gamma-ray astronomy. The main instrument, the Fermi Large Area Telescope (LAT), with a wide field of…
Star Formation Across Cosmic Time (SFACT) is a new narrowband survey designed to detect faint emission-line galaxies and QSOs over a broad range of redshifts. Here we present the first list of SFACT candidates from our pilot-study fields.…