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Studying the atmospheres of exoplanets is one of the most promising ways to learn about distant worlds beyond our solar system. The composition of an exoplanet's atmosphere can provide critical insights into its geology and potential…

I review the development of UV and EUV astronomy, covering the spectral range from 5 to 300 nm, with emphasis on sky surveys for discrete sources. I discuss studies which resulted in lists of sources observed by imaging and deliberately…

As members of the instrument team for the Advanced CCD Imaging Spectrometer (ACIS) on NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and as Chandra General Observers, we have developed a wide variety of data analysis methods that we believe are useful to…

LISA Pathfinder is a mission planned by the European Space Agency to test the key technologies that will allow the detection of gravitational waves in space. The instrument on-board, the LISA Technology package, will undergo an exhaustive…

Atmospheric escape is a fundamental process that affects the structure, composition, and evolution of many planets. The signatures of escape are detectable on close-in, gaseous exoplanets orbiting bright stars, owing to the high levels of…

FORUM (Far-infrared Outgoing Radiation Understanding and Monitoring) was selected in 2019 as the ninth Earth Explorer mission by the European Space Agency (ESA). Its primary objective is to collect interferometric measurements in the…

The Alice UV spectrograph aboard NASA's New Horizons mission is sensitive to MeV electrons that penetrate the instrument's thin aluminum housing and interact with its microchannel plate detector. We have searched for penetrating electrons…

Most observations of the solar corona beyond 2 Rs consist of broadband visible light imagery from coronagraphs. The associated diagnostics mainly consist of kinematics and derivations of the electron number density. While the measurement of…

A new experimental set-up INterStellar Ice-Dust Experiment (INSIDE), was designed for studying cosmic grain analogues represented by ice-coated carbon- and silicate-based dust grains. In the new instrument, we can simulate physical and…

The ESA Rosetta mission has acquired unprecedented measurements of comet 67/P-Churyumov-Gerasimenko (hereafter 67P) nucleus surface, whose composition, as determined by in situ and remote sensing instruments including VIRTIS (Visible,…

We present novel observations utilising the Cassini spacecraft to conduct an observing campaign for stellar astronomy from a vantage point in the outer solar system. By exploiting occultation events in which Mira passed behind the Saturnian…

Understanding the physical processes responsible for accelerating the solar wind requires detailed measurements of the collisionless plasma in the extended solar corona. Some key clues about these processes have come from instruments that…

LISA PathFinder (LPF) will be flown with the objective to test in space key technologies for LISA. However its sensitivity goals are, for good reason, one order of magnitude less than those which LISA will have to meet, both in drag-free…

Research activities during the last decade have shown the strong potential of photonic devices to greatly simplify ground based and space borne astronomical instruments and to improve their performance. We focus specifically on the…

During its two-year mission at comet 67P, Rosetta nearly continuously monitored the inner coma plasma environment for gas production rates varying over three orders of magnitude, at distances to the nucleus from a few to a few hundred km.…

Spectroscopy is one of the most important tools that an astronomer has for studying the universe. This chapter begins by discussing the basics, including the different types of optical spectrographs, with extension to the ultraviolet and…

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…

ESPRESSO is an extremely stable high-resolution spectrograph which is currently being developed for the ESO VLT. With its groundbreaking characteristics it is aimed to be a "science machine", i.e., a fully-integrated instrument to directly…

We present first science observations taken during the commissioning activities of the Spectral Imaging of the Coronal Environment (SPICE) instrument on the ESA/NASA Solar Orbiter mission. SPICE is a high-resolution imaging spectrometer…

The World Space Observatory - Ultraviolet (WSO-UV) space telescope is equipped with high dispersion (55,000) spectrographs working in the 1150-3100 {\AA} spectral range. To evaluate the impact of the design on the scientific objectives of…