Related papers: Airships: A New Horizon for Science
CubeSats are small satellites built in standard sizes and form factors, which have been growing in popularity but have thus far been largely ignored within the field of astronomy. When deployed as space-based telescopes, they enable science…
Airships offer unique operational advantages due to their ability to generate lift via buoyancy, enabling low-speed flight and stationary hovering. These capabilities make them ideal for missions requiring endurance and precision…
The rapid cost growth of flagship space missions has created a crisis for astronomy and planetary science. We have hit the funding wall. For the past 3 decades scientists have not had to think much about how space technology would change…
As part of NASA's mission to explore habitable planets orbiting nearby stars, this paper explores the detection and characterization capabilities of a 4-m space telescope plus 50-m starshade located at the Earth-Sun L2 point, a.k.a. the New…
Telescope and detector developments continuously enable deeper and more detailed studies of astronomical objects. Larger collecting areas, improvement in dispersion and detector techniques, and higher sensitivities allow detection of more…
Author offers and researched the new and revolutionary inflatable electrostatic AB space towers (mast, new space elevator) up to one hundred twenty thousands kilometers (or more) in height. The main innovation is filling the tower by…
Astronomy produces extremely large data sets from ground-based telescopes, space missions, and simulation. The volume and complexity of these rich data sets require new approaches and advanced tools to understand the information contained…
The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope is designed to provide an unprecedented optical imaging dataset that will support investigations of our Solar System, Galaxy and Universe, across half the sky and over ten years of repeated observation.…
I review the status of science with wide field surveys. For many decades surveys have been the backbone of astronomy, and the main engine of discovery, as we have mapped the sky at every possible wavelength. Surveys are an efficient use of…
Small satellite platforms with high performance avionics are becoming more affordable. So far, with a few exceptions, small satellites have been mainly dedicated to earth observation. However, astronomy is a fascinating field with a history…
Commercial operation of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) would benefit from an onboard ability to sense and avoid (SAA) potential mid-air collision threats. In this paper we present a new approach for detection of aircraft below the horizon.…
With the upcoming launch of space telescopes dedicated to the study of exoplanets, the \textit{Atmospheric Remote-Sensing Infrared Exoplanet Large-survey} (ARIEL) and the \textit{James Webb Space Telescope} (JWST), a new era is opening in…
Adaptive Optics is a prime example of how progress in observational astronomy can be driven by technological developments. At many observatories it is now considered to be part of a standard instrumentation suite, enabling ground-based…
I argue that there is a crisis in optical Astronomy due to a paucity of telescopes and thus the need for a paradigm shift in telescope technology. Large increases in collecting areas and observing time/astronomer are only possible if we…
Astronomy provides a laboratory for extreme physics, a window into environments at extremes of distance, temperature and density that often can't be reproduced in Earth laboratories, or at least not right away. A surprising amount of the…
An effective method for detailed observation of the Solar System planets is the use of vehicles that can perform flight in their atmospheres, with the most promising of them being Flyers (aircraft for other planets atmospheres). Besides the…
We briefly discuss the past, present, and future state of astronomical science with laser guide star adaptive optics (LGS AO). We present a tabulation of refereed science papers from LGS AO, amounting to a total of 23 publications as of May…
Astrophysics spans an enormous range of questions on scales from individual planets to the entire cosmos. To address the richness of 21st century astrophysics requires a corresponding richness of telescopes spanning all bands and all…
The rapid emergence of airborne platforms and imaging sensors are enabling new forms of aerial surveillance due to their unprecedented advantages in scale, mobility, deployment and covert observation capabilities. This paper provides a…
The Advanced Technology Large-Aperture Space Telescope (ATLAST) is a set of mission concepts for the next generation of UVOIR space observatory with a primary aperture diameter in the 8-m to 16-m range that will allow us to perform some of…