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We summarize the past four decades of astrophysics and exoplanet direct imaging mission concept studies, technology developments, and scientific progress that have led to the initiation of the Habitable Worlds Observatory project by NASA.
The successes of previous and current Mars rovers have encouraged space agencies worldwide to pursue additional planetary exploration missions with more ambitious navigation goals. For example, NASA's planned Mars Sample Return mission will…
Understanding the Universe's origins and evolution remains one of the most fundamental challenges in modern cosmology. This white paper explores three key science priorities in this field: unravelling the physics of cosmic inflation,…
The mechanism(s) driving the early- and late-time accelerated expansion of the Universe represent one of the most compelling mysteries in fundamental physics today. The path to understanding the causes of early- and late-time acceleration…
The changing heavens have played a central role in the scientific effort of astronomers for centuries. Galileo's synoptic observations of the moons of Jupiter and the phases of Venus starting in 1610, provided strong refutation of Ptolemaic…
Planetary science beyond the boundaries of our Solar System is today in its infancy. Until a couple of decades ago, the detailed investigation of the planetary properties was restricted to objects orbiting inside the Kuiper Belt. Today, we…
The field of gamma-ray astronomy has experienced impressive progress over the last decade. Thanks to the advent of a new generation of imaging air Cherenkov telescopes (H.E.S.S., MAGIC, VERITAS) and thanks to the launch of the Fermi-LAT…
The Habitable Worlds Observatory (HWO), NASA's next flagship science mission, follows in the tradition of the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope and other preceding great observatories. HWO will directly image and characterize Earth-like…
The number of small satellites has grown dramatically in the past decade from tens of satellites per year in the mid-2010s to a projection of tens of thousands in orbit by the mid-2020s. This presents both problems and opportunities for…
Recent years have seen dramatic progress in cosmology and particle astrophysics. So much so that anyone who dares to offer an overview would certainly risk him- or herself for being incomplete and biased at best, and even incorrect due to…
Space-based experiments today can uniquely address important questions related to the fundamental laws of Nature. In particular, high-accuracy physics experiments in space can test relativistic gravity and probe the physics beyond the…
We summarize the remarkable recent progress in ultra-high energy cosmic ray physics and astronomy enabled by the current generation of cosmic ray observatories. We discuss the primary objectives for future measurements and describe the…
We specify the four kinds of rotational cosmologies that are avaliable in Theoretical Cosmology. NASA spacecrafts has suffered from three anomalies. The Pioneers spacecrafts were decelerated, and their spin when not disturbed, was…
This year marks the 20th anniversary of the effective beginning of large, systematic redshift surveys of galaxies. These surveys have had a major impact on observational cosmology and on our current understanding of large-scale structures…
The search for life in the universe is a major theme of astronomy and astrophysics for the next decade. Searches for technosignatures are complementary to searches for biosignatures, in that they offer an alternative path to discovery, and…
(Abridged) Cosmology faces three distinct challenges in the next decade. (1) The dark sector, both dark matter and dark energy, dominates the Universe. Key questions include determining the nature of both. Improved observational probes are…
The observational evidence for the recent 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.…
As our capacity to study ever-expanding domains of our science has increased (including the time domain, non-electromagnetic phenomena, magnetized plasmas, and numerous sky surveys in multiple wavebands with broad spatial coverage and…
While purely philosophical in the early times, and still very speculative at the beginning of the twentieth century, Cosmology has gradually entered into the realm of experimental science over the past eighty years. It has raised some…
The Origins Space Telescope, one of four large Mission Concept studies sponsored by NASA for review in the 2020 US Astrophysics Decadal Survey, will open unprecedented discovery space in the infrared, unveiling our cosmic origins. We…