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In the coming decade, up to 100 000 satellites in large constellations could be launched into low Earth orbit. The satellites will introduce a variety of negative impacts on astronomy observatories and science, which vary from negligible to…
Solar-like oscillations in red-giant stars are now commonly detected in thousands of stars with space telescopes such as the NASA Kepler mission. Parallel radial velocity and photometric measurements would help to better understand the…
The measurement of type Ia supernovae magnitudes provides cosmological distances, which can be used to constrain dark energy parameters. Large photometric surveys require a substantial improvement in the calibration precision of their…
High-precision astrometry throughout the Local Group is a unique capability of the Hubble Space Telescope (HST), with potential for transformative science, including constraining the nature of dark matter, probing the epoch of reionization,…
We present the description of the instruments and the first results of the PRime-focus Infrared Microlensing Experiment (PRIME). PRIME is the first dedicated near-infrared (NIR) microlensing survey telescope located at the South African…
Euclid is a European Space Agency (ESA) mission designed to constrain the properties of dark energy and gravity via weak gravitational lensing and galaxy clustering. It will carry out a wide area imaging and spectroscopy survey in visible…
FLARE (First Light And Reionization Explorer) is a space mission that will be submitted to ESA (M5 call). Its primary goal (about 80% of lifetime) is to identify and study galaxies that dwell in the universe before the end of the…
Visual inspection of space-borne assets is of increasing interest to spacecraft operators looking to plan maintenance, characterise damage, and extend the life of high-value satellites in orbit. The environment of Low Earth Orbit (LEO)…
Astro-WISE is the Astronomical Wide-field Imaging System for Europe. It is a scientific information system which consists of hardware and software federated over about a dozen institutes throughout Europe. It has been developed to exploit…
The ESA PLATO space mission is devoted to unveiling and characterizing new extrasolar planets and their host stars. This mission will encompass a very large field of view, granting it the potential to survey up to one million stars…
The Dark matter Nanosatellite Equipped with Skipper Sensors (DarkNESS) deploys a recently developed skipper-CCD architecture with sub-electron readout noise in low Earth orbit (LEO) to investigate potential signatures of dark matter (DM).…
The Spectral Imaging of the Coronal Environment (SPICE) instrument is a high-resolution imaging spectrometer operating at extreme ultraviolet (EUV) wavelengths. In this paper, we present the concept, design, and pre-launch performance of…
Precision astrometry at microarcsecond accuracy has application to a wide range of astrophysical problems. This paper is a study of the science questions that can be addressed using an instrument that delivers parallaxes at about 4…
The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) will search for planets transiting bright and nearby stars. TESS has been selected by NASA for launch in 2017 as an Astrophysics Explorer mission. The spacecraft will be placed into a highly…
Chemically peculiar (CP) stars with a measurable magnetic field comprise the group of mCP stars. The pulsating members define the subgroup of rapidly oscillating Ap (roAp) stars, of which Alpha Circini is the brightest member. Hence, Alpha…
WFIRST is NASA's first flagship mission with pre-defined core science programs to study dark energy and perform a statistical census of wide orbit exoplanets with a gravitational microlensing survey. Together, these programs are expected to…
HERMES (High Energy Rapid Modular Ensemble of Satellites) is a space-borne mission based on a constellation of nano-satellites flying in a low-Earth orbit (LEO). The six 3U CubeSat buses host new miniaturized instruments hosting a hybrid…
A major endeavor of this decade is the direct characterization of young giant exoplanets at high spectral resolution to determine the composition of their atmosphere and infer their formation processes and evolution. Such a goal represents…
The Australian Space Eye is a proposed astronomical telescope based on a 6U CubeSat platform. The Space Eye will exploit the low level of systematic errors achievable with a small space based telescope to enable high accuracy measurements…
Deep-space laser ranging will be ideal for testing relativistic gravity, and mapping the solar-system to an unprecedented accuracy. ASTROD (Astrodynamical Space Test of Relativity using Optical Devices) and ASTROD I are such missions.…