Related papers: Low cost multi-purpose balloon-borne platform for …
Heliotropes are passive solar hot air balloons that are capable of achieving nearly level flight within the lower stratosphere for several hours. These inexpensive flight platforms enable stratospheric sensing with high-cadence enabled by…
Contemporary astronomy benefits of very large and rapidly growing amounts of data in all bands of the electromagnetic spectrum, from long-wavelength radio waves to high energy gamma-rays. Astronomers normally specialize in data taken in one…
Earth is constantly being bombarded with material from space. Most of the natural material end up being dust grains that litter the surface of Earth, but larger bodies are known to impact every few decades. The most recent large impact was…
Due to ionosphere absorption and the interference by natural and artificial radio emissions, ground observation of the sky at the decameter or longer is very difficult. This unexplored part of electromagnetic spectrum has the potential of…
The GLAST Balloon Flight Engineering Model (BFEM) represents one of 16 towers that constitute the Large Area Telescope (LAT), a high-energy (>20 MeV) gamma-ray pair-production telescope being built by an international partnership of…
This paper presents the concept of a community-accessible stratospheric balloon-based observatory that is currently under preparation by a consortium of European research institutes and industry. The planned European Stratospheric Balloon…
We present a publicly-available toolkit of flight-proven hardware and software to retrieve 5 TB of data or small physical samples from a stratospheric balloon platform. Before launch, a capsule is attached to the balloon, and rises with it.…
Visual observations of meteor showers have been carried out for many decades by astronomers. Modern developments in imaging systems have advanced our knowledge about the shower dynamics and their origin. We have made an attempt to make a…
We present a design for a near-ultraviolet (NUV) imaging instrument which may be flown on a range of available platforms, including high-altitude balloons, nanosatellites, or space missions. Although all current UV space missions adopt a…
We describe the development and implementation of a light-weight, fully autonomous 2-axis pointing and stabilization system designed for balloon-borne astronomical payloads. The system is developed using off-the-shelf components such as…
Over the past decade, the Internet of Things and smart devices have become increasingly common as part of the technological infrastructure that surrounds us. The flow of data generated by these systems is characterized by enormous…
Satellite imaging is a critical technology for monitoring and responding to natural disasters such as flooding. Despite the capabilities of modern satellites, there is still much to be desired from the perspective of first response…
Astronomy has been at the forefront of the development of the techniques and methodologies of data intensive science for over a decade with large sky surveys and distributed efforts such as the Virtual Observatory. However, it faces a new…
The observation of gaseous giant planets is of high scientific interest. Although they have been the targets of several spacecraft missions, there still remains a need for continuous ground-based observations. As their atmospheres present…
In recent decades, GNSS Radio Occultation soundings have proven an invaluable input to global weather forecasting. The success of government-sponsored programs such as COSMIC is now complemented by commercial low-cost cubesat…
The Universe is almost totally unexplored at low surface brightness levels. In spite of great progress in the construction of large telescopes and improvements in the sensitivity of detectors, the limiting surface brightness of imaging…
The millimeter/sub-millimeter (mm/sub-mm) sky remains a rich but under-explored frontier for transient and variable phenomena. A wide-field, high-sensitivity instrument with a large aperture and degree-scale field of view would open this…
We propose a suite of telescopes be deployed as part of the Artemis III human-crewed expedition to the lunar south pole, able to collect wide-field simultaneous far-ultraviolet (UV), near-UV, and optical band images with a fast cadence (10…
The exploration of the time-variable astronomical sky at submm wavelengths is rapidly becoming more feasible with large sky surveys by Cosmic Microwave Background telescopes with tens of thousands of detectors. Observations with the Atacama…
Atmospheric turbulence, especially in the near-surface boundary layer is known to be under-sampled due to the need to capture a wide separation in length and time-scales and limitation in the number of sensors. Over the past decade, the use…