Related papers: The Breakthrough Starshot System Model
The scientific interest in directly image and identifying Earth-like planets within the Habitable Zone (HZ) around nearby stars is driving the design of specialized direct imaging mission such as ACESAT, EXO-C, EXO-S and AFTA-C. The inner…
Interstellar material has been discovered in our Solar System, yet its origins and details of its transport are unknown. Here we present $\alpha$ Centauri as a case study of the delivery of interstellar material to our Solar System.…
Discovered in October 2017, the interstellar object designated 1I/'Oumuamua was the first such object to be observed travelling through our solar system. 1I/'Oumuamua has other characteristics never seen before in a celestial body and…
The Breakthrough Starshot initiative aims to launch a gram-scale spacecraft to a speed of $v\sim 0.2$c, capable of reaching the nearest star system, $\alpha$ Centauri, in about 20 years. However, a critical challenge for the initiative is…
In this paper we outline the considerations required in order to select a target star system for the Icarus interstellar mission. It is considered that the maximum likely range for the Icarus vehicle will be 15 light-years, and a list is…
Direct imaging simulations of starshades and other proposed mission concepts are needed to characterize planet detection performance and inform mission design trades. In order to assess the complementary role of a 60 m starshade for the…
Aerocapture is the technique of using planetary atmospheres to decelerate a spacecraft in a single pass to achieve nearly fuel-free orbit insertion. Aerocapture has been extensively studied since the 1980s but has never been flown yet. The…
We present the results of a study along with a first prototype of a high precision system (? 1 arcsec) for pointing and tracking light (near-infrared) telescopes on board stratospheric balloons. Such a system is essentially composed by a…
Interstellar probes can carry out slingshot manoeuvres around the stars they visit, gaining a boost in velocity by extracting energy from the star's motion around the Galactic Centre. These maneouvres carry little to no extra energy cost,…
This paper investigates an autonomous navigation method for spacecraft operating in the outer solar system, up to 250 AU from the Sun, using the parallactic shifts of nearby stars. These measurements enable estimation of the spacecraft…
As part of NASA's mission to explore habitable planets orbiting nearby stars, this paper explores the detection and characterization capabilities of a 4-m space telescope plus 50-m starshade located at the Earth-Sun L2 point, a.k.a. the New…
PicSat is a nanosatellite currently being developed to observe the transit of the giant planet \b{eta} Pictoris, expected some time between July 2017 and June 2018. The mission is based on a Cubesat architecture, with a small but ambitious…
We explore the capabilities of a starshade mission to directly image multi-star systems. In addition to the diffracted and scattered light for the on-axis star, a multi-star system features additional starlight leakage from the off-axis…
Alpha Centauri A is the closest solar-type star to the Sun and offers an excellent opportunity to detect the thermal emission of a mature planet heated by its host star. The MIRI coronagraph on JWST can search the 1-3 AU (1"-2") region…
We have developed a low-cost off-the-shelf component star sensor (StarSense) for use in minisatellites and CubeSats to determine the attitude of a satellite in orbit. StarSense is an imaging camera with a limiting magnitude of 6.5, which…
Previous work in studying interstellar exploration by one or several probes has focused primarily either on engineering models for a spacecraft targeting a single star system, or large-scale simulations to ascertain the time required for a…
The bright, nearby binary $\alpha$ Centauri provides an excellent laboratory for testing stellar evolution models, as it is one of the few stellar systems for which we have high-precision classical (mass, radius, luminosity) and…
A search for laser light from the directions of Alpha Centauri A and B was performed by examining 15362 optical, high-resolution spectra obtained between 2004 and 2018. None of the spectra exhibit laser emission lines. The threshold was 10%…
(abridged) A complete census of planetary systems around a volume-limited sample of solar-type stars (FGK dwarfs) in the Solar neighborhood with uniform sensitivity down to Earth-mass planets within their Habitable Zones out to several AUs…
This paper presents a study for the realization of a space mission which employs nanosatellites driven by an external laser source impinging on an optimized lightsail, as a valuable technology to launch swarms of spacecrafts into the Solar…