Related papers: Improving science yield for NASA Swift with automa…
With the launch and application of next-generation ground- and space-based telescopes, astronomy has entered the era of big data, necessitating more efficient and robust data analysis methods. Most traditional parameter estimation methods…
Gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) are intense, short-lived bursts of gamma-ray radiation observed up to a high redshift ($z \sim 10$) due to their luminosities. Thus, they can serve as cosmological tools to probe the early Universe. However, we need…
The Gamow Explorer will use Gamma Ray Bursts (GRBs) to: 1) probe the high redshift universe (z > 6) when the first stars were born, galaxies formed and Hydrogen was reionized; and 2) enable multi-messenger astrophysics by rapidly…
CubeSats have the potential to expand astrophysical discovery space, complementing ground-based electromagnetic and gravitational-wave observatories. The CubeSat design specifications help streamline delivery of instrument payloads to…
The Grid technology is evolving into a global, service-orientated architecture, a universal platform for delivering future high demand computational services. Strong adoption of the Grid and the utility computing concept is leading to an…
Modern astronomical surveys such as the Large Synoptic Sky Survey (LSST) promise an unprecedented wealth of discoveries, delivered in the form of ~10 million alerts of time-variable events per night. Astronomers are faced with the daunting…
Planet yield calculations may be used to inform the target selection strategy and science operations of space observatories. Forthcoming and proposed NASA missions, such as the Wide-Field Infrared Survey Telescope (WFIRST), the Habitable…
Wider adoption of the Grid concept has led to an increasing amount of federated computational, storage and visualisation resources being available to scientists and researchers. Distributed and heterogeneous nature of these resources…
The operation-planning of satellites, aimed at introducing a certain level of supervised automation during the execution of the operations, poses a great challenge to both designers and operators. From one side, the routine operations for…
The era of multi-messenger astrophysics requires rapid and efficient follow-up of transient events, many of which, such as gravitational waves (GW), gamma-ray bursts (GRB), and high-energy neutrinos, suffer from poor sky localisation. We…
Simulations of galaxy formation follow the gravitational and hydrodynamical interactions between gas, stars and dark matter through cosmic time. The huge dynamic range of such calculations severely limits strong scaling behaviour of the…
Autonomous exploration is a crucial aspect of robotics that has numerous applications. Most of the existing methods greedily choose goals that maximize immediate reward. This strategy is computationally efficient but insufficient for…
This paper introduces an algorithm to perform optimal reorientation of a spacecraft during a high speed flyby mission that maximizes the time a certain target is kept within the field of view of scientific instruments. The method directly…
Supergiant Fast X-ray Transients (SFXTs) are HMXBs with OB supergiant companions. I review the results of the Swift SFXT Project, which since 2007 has been exploiting Swift's capabilities in a systematic study of SFXTs and supergiant X-ray…
The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) will be a discovery machine for the astronomy and physics communities, revealing astrophysical phenomena from the Solar System to the outer reaches of the observable Universe. While many…
Galactic science encompasses a wide range of subjects in the study of the Milky Way and Magellanic Clouds, from Young Stellar Objects to X-ray Binaries. Mapping these populations, and exploring transient phenomena within them, are among the…
The distributed telescope array offers promise for conducting large-sky-area, high-frequency time domain surveys. Multiple telescopes can be deployed at each observation site, so intra-site observation task scheduling is crucial for…
Utilizing more than 100 long gamma-ray bursts (LGRBs) in the Swift-Ryan-2012 sample that include the observed redshifts and jet angles, Le & Mehta performed a timely study of the rate-density of LGRBs with an assumed broken power law GRB…
Aiming at improving the survey efficiency of the Wide Field Survey Telescope, we have developed a basic scheduling strategy that takes into account the telescope characteristics, observing conditions, and weather conditions at the Lenghu…
The era of data-intensive astronomy is being ushered in with the increasing size and complexity of observational data across wavelength and time domains, the development of algorithms to extract information from this complexity, and the…