Related papers: STE-QUEST Mission and System Design - Overview aft…
Gaia is a satellite mission of the ESA, aiming at absolute astrometric measurements of about one billion stars (all stars down to 20th magnitude, with unprecedented accuracy. Additionally, magnitudes and colors will be obtained for all…
Gaia is a fully-approved all-sky astrometric and photometric survey due for launch in 2011. It will measure accurate parallaxes and proper motions for everything brighter than G=20 (ca. 10^9 stars). Its primary objective is to study the…
Gaia is a very ambitious mission of the European Space Agency. At the heart of Gaia lie the measurements of the positions, distances, space motions, brightnesses and astrophysical parameters of stars, which represent fundamental pillars of…
The Einstein Equivalence Principle (EEP) underpins all metric theories of gravity. One of its key aspects is the local position invariance (LPI) of non-gravitational experiments, which is captured by the gravitational red-shift. The iconic…
NEAT is an astrometric mission proposed to ESA with the objectives of detecting Earth-like exoplanets in the habitable zone of nearby solar-type stars. NEAT requires the capability to measure stellar centroids at the precision of 5e-6…
Gaia is a satellite mission of the European Space Agency which is creating a catalogue of extremely accurate positions, distances and space motions of two billion stars in our Galaxy, along with more than one hundred thousand solar system…
The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) will provide unprecedented opportunities to observe the rings and small satellites in our solar system, accomplishing three primary objectives: 1) discovering new rings and moons, 2) unprecedented…
The Gravitation Astrometric Measurement Experiment (GAME) is a mission concept based on astronomical techniques (astrometry and coronagraphy) for Fundamental Physics measurements, namely the \gamma\ and \beta\ parameters of the Parametrized…
We report on a new test of the gravitational redshift and thus of local position invariance, an integral part of the Einstein equivalence principle, which is the foundation of general relativity and all metric theories of gravitation. We…
The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) is NASA's latest space telescope dedicated to the discovery of transiting exoplanets around nearby stars. Besides the main goal of the mission, asteroseismology is an important secondary goal…
Astrophysical measurements away from the 1 AU orbit of Earth can enable several astrophysical science cases that are challenging or impossible to perform from Earthbound platforms, including: building a detailed understanding of the…
THESEUS, one of the two space mission concepts being studied by ESA as candidates for next M5 mission within its Comsic Vision programme, aims at fully exploiting Gamma-Ray Bursts (GRB) to solve key questions about the early Universe, as…
Understanding the nature of Dark Matter and Dark Energy is one of the most pressing issues in cosmology and fundamental physics. The purpose of the DUNE (Dark UNiverse Explorer) mission is to study these two cosmological components with…
The Solar System Odyssey mission uses modern-day high-precision experimental techniques to test the laws of fundamental physics which determine dynamics in the solar system. It could lead to major discoveries by using demonstrated…
Quantum physics challenges our understanding of the nature of physical reality and of space-time and suggests the necessity of radical revisions of their underlying concepts. Experimental tests of quantum phenomena involving massive…
Hard X-/soft gamma-ray astronomy is a crucial field for transient, nuclear and multimessenger astrophysics. However, the spatial localization, imaging capabilities and sensitivity of the measurements are strongly limited for the energy…
The hard x-ray (10-600 keV) sky is inherently time variable and yet has neither been surveyed nor monitored with a sensitive imaging telescope. The Energetic X-ray Imaging Survey Telescope (EXIST) is a mission concept, proposed for MIDEX,…
The Star Watch extreme-precision astrometry mission (0.1 - 1.0 uas) builds on technology developed, and validated, during the SIM (Space Interferometry Mission) project. The sole science instrument is an optical interferometer with 50-cm…
Tracing the formation and evolution of all supermassive black holes, including the obscured ones, understanding how black holes influence their surroundings and how matter behaves under extreme conditions, are recognized as key science…
The Astrodynamical Space Test of Relativity using Optical Devices (ASTROD) is a multi-purpose relativity mission concept. ASTROD's scientific goals are the measurement of relativistic and solar system parameters to unprecedented precision,…