Related papers: Improving science yield for NASA Swift with automa…
We describe the results of the first year of a program to localize new Galactic Transient sources discovered by MAXI with NASA's Swift mission. Swift is ideally suited for follow-up of MAXI discovered transients as its X-ray Telescope (XRT)…
In the introduction we give the main characteristics of the Swift mission outlining how the design was driven by the science goals and by the heritage we got from the Italian - Dutch satellite Beppo SAX. We show some of the new…
Earth observation satellites (EOSs) play a pivotal role in capturing and analyzing planetary phenomena, ranging from natural disasters to societal development. The EOS scheduling problem (EOSSP), which optimizes the schedule of EOSs, is…
Earth-observation satellites are emerging as distributed edge platforms for time-critical tasks, yet orbital scheduling remains challenged by intermittent energy harvesting and temporal coupling where eager execution risks future battery…
The emergence of "big data" offers unprecedented opportunities for not only accelerating scientific advances but also enabling new modes of discovery. Scientific progress in many disciplines is increasingly enabled by our ability to examine…
The increasing number and complexity of planetary exploration space missions require new tools to access, visualize and analyse data to improve their scientific return. ASI Science Data Center (ASDC) addresses this request with the web-tool…
The Swift Burst Alert Telescope (BAT) is a coded aperture gamma-ray instrument with a large field of view that primarily operates in survey mode when it is not triggering on transient events. The survey data consists of eighty-channel…
Swift is shedding new light on the phenomenon of Supergiant Fast X-ray Transients (SFXTs), a recently discovered class of High-Mass X-ray Binaries, whose optical counterparts are O or B supergiants, and whose X-ray outbursts are about 10000…
The Swift Burst Alert Telescope (BAT) hard X-ray transient monitor tracks more than 700 galactic and extragalactic sources on time scales ranging from a single Swift pointing (approximately 20 minutes) to one day. The monitored sources…
The Burst Alert Telescope (BAT) is one of 3 instruments on the Swift MIDEX spacecraft to study gamma-ray bursts (GRBs). The BAT first detects the GRB and localizes the burst direction to an accuracy of 1-4 arcmin within 20 sec after the…
We present the progress of work to streamline and simplify the process of exoplanet observation by citizen scientists. International collaborations such as ExoClock and Exoplanet Watch enable citizen scientists to use small telescopes to…
The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) will provide for unbiased sampling of variability properties of objects with $r$ mag $<$ 24. This should allow for those objects whose variations reveal their orbital periods ($P_{orb}$), such as…
The StarLight program conceptualizes fast interstellar travel via small wafer satellites (wafersats) that are propelled by directed energy. This process is wildly different from traditional space travel and trades large and slow spacecraft…
We report here on the recent results of a monitoring campaign we have been carrying out with Swift/XRT on a sample of four Supergiant Fast X-ray Transients. The main goal of this large programme (with a net Swift/XRT exposure of 540 ks,…
Although most scheduling problems are NP-hard, domain specific techniques perform well in practice but are quite expensive to construct. In adaptive problem-solving solving, domain specific knowledge is acquired automatically for a general…
The optimal instant of observation of astrophysical phenomena for objects that vary on human time-sales is an important problem, as it bears on the cost-effective use of usually scarce observational facilities. In this paper we address this…
As the time-domain survey telescope of the highest survey power in the northern hemisphere currently, Wide Field Survey Telescope (WFST) is scheduled to hourly/daily/semi-weekly scan northern sky up to ~23 mag in four optical (ugri) bands.…
We study the spectral and energetics properties of 47 long-duration gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) with known redshift, all of them detected by the Swift satellite. Due to the narrow energy range (15-150 keV) of the Swift-BAT detector, the…
Cosmic acceleration is the most surprising cosmological discovery in many decades. Testing and distinguishing among possible explanations requires cosmological measurements of extremely high precision probing the full history of cosmic…
A sample of 286 gamma-ray bursts, detected by Swift satellite, is studied statistically by the chi^2 test and the Student t-test, respectively. The short and long subgroups are well detected in the Swift data. But no intermediate subgroup…