Related papers: The Science Case for an Extended Spitzer Mission

NASA's WFIRST mission will perform a wide-field, NIR survey of the Galactic Bulge to search for exoplanets via the microlensing techniques. As the mission is due to launch in the mid-2020s, around half-way through the LSST Main Survey, we…

The K2 mission will make use of the Kepler spacecraft and its assets to expand upon Kepler's groundbreaking discoveries in the fields of exoplanets and astrophysics through new and exciting observations. K2 will use an innovative way of…

Exoplanetary science has reached a historic moment. The James Webb Space Telescope will be capable of probing the atmospheres of rocky planets, and perhaps even search for biologically produced gases. However this is contingent on…

[Abridged] We have only been able to comprehensively characterize the atmospheres of a handful of transiting planets, because most orbit faint stars. TESS will discover transiting planets orbiting the brightest stars, enabling, in…

CHEOPS is a space telescope specifically designed to monitor transiting exoplanets orbiting bright stars. In September 2023, CHEOPS completed its nominal mission and remains in excellent operational conditions. The mission has been extended…

IRAC excels at detecting distant objects. Due to a combination of the shapes of the spectral energy distributions of galaxies and the low background achieved from space, IRAC reaches greater depth in comparable exposure time at 3.6 and 4.5…

The ESA space mission Euclid was launched on July 1st, 2023 and is undergoing its science verification phase. In this invited review we show that Euclid means a before and an after for our understanding of ultra-cool dwarfs and…

In its 16 years of scientific measurements, the Spitzer Space Telescope performed a number of ground breaking and key infrared measurements of Solar System objects near and far. Targets ranged from the smallest planetesimals to the giant…

We highlight how guaranteed time observations (GTOs) and early release science (ERS) will advance understanding of exoplanet atmospheres and provide a glimpse into what transiting exoplanet science will be done with JWST during its first…

In its 16 years of scientific measurements, the Spitzer Space Telescope performed a number of ground-breaking infrared measurements of Solar System objects. In this second of two papers, we describe results from Spitzer observations of…

FINESSE, a NASA MIDEX mission in Step 2, would conduct a large, uniform survey of exoplanet atmospheres and create a statistically significant sample for comparative planetology. FINESSE's technical capabilities, driven by a scientific…

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), scheduled for launch in 2018, is the successor to the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) but with a significantly larger aperture (6.5 m) and advanced instrumentation focusing on infrared science (0.6-28.0…

During its two-year prime mission, the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) is obtaining full-frame images with a regular 30-minute cadence in a sequence of 26 sectors that cover a combined 85% of the sky. While its primary science…

After the success of the refurbishment mission to HST in December 1993, the telescope has taken its place at the very leading edge of astrophysical research. The breadth and depth of the topics covered at the HST conference in Paris in…

In this White Paper we present the potential of the enhanced X-ray Timing and Polarimetry (eXTP) mission for studies related to Observatory Science targets. These include flaring stars, supernova remnants, accreting white dwarfs, low and…

A new mission about twenty years after Gaia with similar astrometric performance would be important for all branches of astronomy. The two missions together would, e.g., give much more accurate motions of the common objects due to the large…

We present astrometric measurements for 13 cold brown dwarfs in the solar neighborhood (d < 20pc). By combining archival Spitzer data with our own Hubble Space Telescope (HST) observations, we achieve parallax uncertainties typically around…

The advent of the Spitzer Space Telescope has revolutionized our understanding of the history of star formation and galaxy mass assembly in the Universe. The tremendous leap in sensitivity from previous mid-to-far IR missions has allowed…

Short-period super-Earths and Neptunes are now known to be very frequent around solar-type stars. Improving our understanding of these mysterious planets requires the detection of a significant sample of objects suitable for detailed…

The outer solar system provides a unique, quiet vantage point from which to observe the universe around us, where measurements could enable several niche astrophysical science cases that are too difficult to perform near Earth. NASA's New…