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India reached a major milestone in the area of space astronomy with the successful launch and post-launch operations of its first space observatory, AstroSat. The success of this space observatory and the lessons learned must be utilized…
e-ASTROGAM is a gamma-ray observatory operating in a broad energy range, 0.15 MeV - 3 GeV, recently proposed as the M5 Medium-size mission of the European Space Agency. It has the potential to revolutionize the astronomy of medium-energy…
Gaia is a European Space Agency (ESA) astrometry space mission, and a successor to the ESA Hipparcos mission. Gaia's main goal is to collect high-precision astrometric data (i.e. positions, parallaxes, and proper motions) for the brightest…
We describe the GRB and All-sky Monitor Experiment (GAME) mission submitted by a large international collaboration (Italy, Germany, Czech Repubblic, Slovenia, Brazil) in response to the 2012 ESA call for a small mission opportunity for a…
The Weak Equivalence Principle (WEP) is a central pillar of general relativity. Its precise test with quantum systems in space offers a unique window onto new physics. Here we report the first in-orbit quantum test of the WEP. A…
Major advancements in space science and detector technology brought about a revolution in global astrometry, the science of measuring distances and motions of stars in the Milky Way and in the local universe. From the first ESA astrometric…
e-ASTROGAM (enhanced ASTROGAM) is a breakthrough Observatory space mission, with a detector composed by a Silicon tracker, a calorimeter, and an anticoincidence system, dedicated to the study of the non-thermal Universe in the photon energy…
The discovery of the accelerating expansion of the Universe, thought to be driven by a mysterious form of `dark energy' constituting most of the Universe, has further revived the interest in testing Einstein's theory of General Relativity.…
Gaia is an ambitious space astrometry mission of ESA with a main objective to map the sky in astrometry and photometry down to a magnitude 20 by the end of the next decade. While the mission is built and operated by ESA and an industrial…
(abridged) A complete census of planetary systems around a volume-limited sample of solar-type stars (FGK dwarfs) in the Solar neighborhood with uniform sensitivity down to Earth-mass planets within their Habitable Zones out to several AUs…
We develop a high-precision model for relativistic observables of the Atomic Clock Ensemble in Space (ACES) experiment on the International Space Station (ISS). We develop all relativistic coordinate transformations that are needed to…
Athena is an X-ray observatory-class mission concept, developed from April to December 2011 as a result of the reformulation exercise for L-class mission proposals in the framework of ESA's Cosmic Vision 2015-2025. Athena's science case is…
Sky survey telescopes and powerful targeted telescopes play complementary roles in astronomy. In order to investigate the nature and characteristics of the motions of very faint objects, a flexibly-pointed instrument capable of high…
While tested to a high level of accuracy in the Solar system, general relativity is under the spotlight of both theoreticians and observers on larger scales, mainly because of the need to introduce dark matter and dark energy in the…
The MICROSCOPE space mission aims to test the Equivalence Principle with an accuracy of $10^{-15}$. The drag-free micro-satellite will orbit around the Earth and embark a differential electrostatic accelerometer including two cylindrical…
The JEM-EUSO mission aims to explore the origin of the extreme energy cosmic rays (EECRs) through the observation of air-shower fluorescence light from space. The superwide-field telescope looks down from the International Space Station…
Einstein Telescope (ET) is a possible third generation ground-based gravitational wave observatory for which a design study is currently being carried out. A brief (and non-exhaustive) overview is given of ET's projected capabilities…
The recent observational evidence for the acceleration of the universe demonstrates that canonical theories of cosmology and particle physics are incomplete - if not incorrect - and that new physics is out there, waiting to be discovered.…
CASTAway is a mission concept to explore our Solar System's main asteroid belt. Asteroids and comets provide a window into the formation and evolution of our Solar System and the composition of these objects can be inferred from space-based…
ASTROD (Astrodynamical Space Test of Relativity using Optical Devices) mission concept is to conduct high-precision measurement of relativistic effects,solar-system parameters and gravitational waves. In this paper, we first extend the…