Related papers: Low cost multi-purpose balloon-borne platform for …
Microwave sounding is the leading driver of global numerical weather forecasting, but is limited by the scalability of such instruments. With modern machining and commercial microwave components, it is now possible to design low size,…
The POEMMA-Balloon with Radio (PBR) is a proposed payload to fly on a NASA Super Pressure Balloon (SPB). It will act as a pathfinder of the Probe Of Extreme Multi-Messenger Astrophysics (POEMMA) detector. PBR will consist of an innovative…
FIREBall-2 is a stratospheric balloon-borne 1-m telescope coupled to a UV multi-object slit spectrograph designed to map the faint UV emission surrounding z~0.7 galaxies and quasars through their Lyman-alpha line emission. This…
The Australian Astronomical Observatory's TAIPAN instrument deploys 150 Starbug robots to position optical fibres to accuracies of 0.3 arcsec, on a 32 cm glass field plate on the focal plane of the 1.2 m UK-Schmidt telescope. This paper…
The recent explosive growth of small satellite operations driven primarily from an academic or pedagogical need, has demonstrated the viability of commercial-off-the-shelf technologies in space. They have also leveraged and shown the need…
Over the past decade, sky surveys such as the Sloan Digital Sky Survey have proven the power of large data sets for answering fundamental astrophysical questions. This observational progress, based on a synergy of advances in telescope…
An outstanding, multi-disciplinary goal of modern science is the study of the diversity of potentially Earth-like planets and the search for life in them. This goal requires a bold new generation of space telescopes, but even the most…
We report on the characteristics and design details of the Medium Scale Anisotropy Measurement (MSAM), a millimeter-wave, balloon-borne telescope that has been used to observe anisotropy in the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation (CMBR)…
The characterization of the optical properties of the atmosphere in the near UV, in particular the tropospheric aerosol stratification, clouds optical depth and spatial distribution are common in the field of atmospheric physics, due to…
Variability in the sky has been known for centuries, even millennia, but our knowledge of it is very incomplete even at the bright end. Current technology makes it possible to built small, robotic optical instruments, to record images and…
Radio astronomy has entered its golden era, with many revolutionary facilities such as SKA, ngVLA, and LOFAR2.0 coming online in the next decade. These facilities are certain to redefine radio astronomy. However, on smaller scales-such as…
During certain times of the year at middle and low latitudes, winds in the upper stratosphere move in nearly the opposite direction than the wind in the lower stratosphere. Here we present a method for maintaining a high-altitude balloon…
Despite the large budgets spent annually on astronomical research equipment such as telescopes, instruments and supercomputers, the general trend is to analyse and view the resulting datasets using small, two-dimensional displays. We report…
The contemporary astronomical instruments have been producing the unprecedented amount of data. The largest part of this "data avalanche" is being produced by deep all-sky surveys yielding terabytes of raw data per night. Such a great data…
Below the knee in the cosmic ray spectrum, balloon and spacecraft experiments offer the capability of direct composition and energy measurements on the primary particles. A major difficulty is obtaining enough exposure to extend the range…
Layer clouds are abundant in the Earth's atmosphere. Such clouds do not become sufficiently strongly charged to generate lightning, but they show weak charging along the upper and lower cloud boundaries where there is a conductivity…
Weak lensing observations have the potential to be even more powerful than cosmic microwave background (CMB) observations in constraining cosmological parameters. However, the practical limits to weak lensing observations are not known.…
We present Archeops, a balloon-borne bolometer experiment designed to map a large part of the sky at millimeter and submillimeter wavelengths. The main scientific goal is to study the Cosmic Microwave Background anisotropies on all scales,…
I examine possible futures for UV astronomy, in view of the past history and collected knowledge of the UV sky through various missions since the early days of Space Astronomy. The last all-sky survey has been by TD-1 in the early 1970s,…
Venus is known for its extreme surface temperature and its sulfuric acid clouds. But the cloud layers on Venus have similar temperature and pressure conditions to those on the surface of Earth and are conjectured to be a possible habitat…