Related papers: Venus transit, aureole and solar diameter

A major focus of the planetary science and astrobiology community is the understanding of planetary habitability, including the myriad factors that control the evolution and sustainability of temperate surface environments such as that of…

In order to perform high resolution astrometry of the solar diameter from the ground, through the observations of eclipses, the study of the limb darkening profile is described. Knowing the profile of the solar limb is useful both to…

A new series of Earth occultation observations has been started in 2012 to refine the determination of the cosmic X-ray background by the INTEGRAL mission. We show here that the new detector lightcurves in the 3 to 160 keV range differ from…

The Hesperos mission proposed in this paper is a mission to Venus to investigate the interior structure and the current level of activity. The main questions to be answered with this mission are whether Venus has an internal structure and…

The modern methods of measurement of the solar diameter and oblateness are reviewed. Either ground-based or balloon-borne and satellite measurements are considered. The importance of solar astrometry for General Relativity is emphasized,…

Starting in December 2014, Kepler K2 observed Neptune continuously for 49 days at a 1-minute cadence. The goals consisted of studying its atmospheric dynamics (Simon et al. 2016), detecting its global acoustic oscillations (Rowe et al.,…

This paper deals with the problem of constructing a flight scheme to Venus, in which a spacecraft flying to the planet after a gravity assist maneuver and transition to a resonant orbit in order to re-encounter with Venus, makes a passage…

Solar radius measurements and their variations -- if any -- are a difficult problem that has vexed researchers for decades. In this paper, we have attempted to clarify the various ways of expressing the definition ''solar diameter'', from a…

We present submillimeter observations of 12CO J=3-2 and J=2-1, and 13CO J = 2-1 lines of the Venusian mesosphere and lower thermosphere with the Heinrich Hertz Submillimeter Telescope (HHSMT) taken around the second MESSENGER flyby of Venus…

Observing extrasolar planetary transits is one of the only ways that we may infer the masses and radii of planets outside the Solar System. As such, the detections made by photometric transit surveys are one of the only foreseeable ways…

Light refracted by the planet's atmosphere is usually ignored in analysis of planetary transits. Here we show that refraction can add shoulders to the transit light curve, i.e., an increase in the observed flux, mostly just before and after…

This is a white paper submitted to the Planetary Science and Astrobiology Decadal Survey. The deep atmosphere of Venus is largely unexplored and yet may harbor clues to the evolutionary pathways for a major silicate planet with implications…

Since the discovery of the first exoplanets more than 20 years ago, there has been an increasing need for photometric and spectroscopic models to characterize these systems. While imaging has been used extensively for Solar System bodies…

This paper reviews the basic technical characteristics of the ground-based photometric searches for transiting planets, and discusses a possible observational selection effect. I suggest that additional photometric observations of the…

The unprecedented precision of broadband stellar photometry achieved with the planet-hunting missions CoRoT and \textit{Kepler} initiated a new era in examining the magnetically-driven brightness variations of hundreds of thousands of…

There are a handful of spectral windows in the near-IR through which we can see down to Venus' surface on the night side of the planet. The surface of our sister planet has thus been imaged by sensors on Venus-orbiting platforms (Venus…

We report vertical thermal structure and wind velocities in the Venusian mesosphere retrieved from carbon monoxide (12CO J=2-1 and 13CO J=2-1) spectral line observations obtained with the Heinrich Hertz Submillimeter Telescope (HHSMT). We…

Photometry with the transit method has arguably been the most successful exoplanet discovery method to date. A short overview about the rise of that method to its present status is given. The method's strength is the rich set of parameters…

The Earth's albedo is a fundamental climate parameter for understanding the radiation budget of the atmosphere. It has been traditionally measured from space platforms, but also from the ground for sixteen years from Big Bear Solar…

Transit spectroscopy is a key tool for exoplanet atmospheric characterization. However, transit spectrum observations can be limited by aerosol extinction when gas opacities are weak. The ultraviolet wavelength range contains a variety of…