Related papers: A Tether-Assisted Space Launch System for Super-Ea…
The growing rate of increase in the number of the discovered extra-solar planets which has consequently raised the enthusiasm to explore the universe in hope of finding earth-like planets has resulted in the wide use of Gravitational…
Determining whether Earth-like planets are common or rare looms as a touchstone in the question of life in the universe. We searched for Earth-size planets that cross in front of their host stars by examining the brightness measurements of…
Amongst the many hundreds of transiting planet candidates discovered by the Kepler Mission, one finds a large number of candidates with sizes between that of the Earth and Neptune. The composition of these worlds is not immediately obvious…
We present a new analytical method to identify potential missed planets in multiplanet systems found via transit surveys such as those conducted by Kepler and TESS. Our method depends on quantifying a system's dynamical packing in terms of…
Terrestrial-like exoplanets may obtain atmospheres from three primary sources: Capture of nebular gases, degassing during accretion, and degassing from subsequent tectonic activity. Here we model degassing during accretion to estimate the…
The proposed Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) will survey the entire sky to locate the nearest and brightest transiting extrasolar planets with orbital periods up to about 36 days. Here we estimate the number and kind of…
The Kepler spacecraft, whose single instrument was a 0.95 m diameter wide-field telescope, operated in a heliocentric orbit for nearly a decade, returning a wealth of data that have revolutionized exoplanet science. Kepler data have been…
A re-purposed Kepler mission could continue the search for nearly Earth-sized planets in very short-period (< 1 day) orbits. Recent surveys of the Kepler data already available have revealed at least a dozen such planetary candidates, and a…
A transiting planet invites us to measure its size, mass, orbital parameters, atmospheric composition, and other characteristics. But the invitation can only be accepted if the host star is bright enough for precise measurements of its flux…
The hundreds of exoplanets that have been discovered in the past two decades offer a new perspective on planetary structure. Instead of being the archetypal examples of planets, those of our Solar System are merely possible outcomes of…
Three planets with minimum masses less than 10 Earth masses orbit the star HD 40307, suggesting these planets may be rocky. However, with only radial velocity data, it is impossible to determine if these planets are rocky or gaseous. Here…
Discovering other worlds the size of our own has been a long-held dream of astronomers. The transiting planets Kepler-20e and Kepler-20f, which belong to a multi-planet system, hold a very special place among the many groundbreaking…
Super-Earths are highly irradiated, small planets with bulk densities approximately consistent with Earth. We construct combined interior-atmosphere models of super-Earths that trace the partitioning of water throughout a planet, including…
Motivated by the large number of compact extrasolar planetary systems discovered by the Kepler Mission, this paper considers perturbations due to possible additional outer planets. The discovered compact systems sometimes contain multiple…
The radius-period distribution of exoplanets has been characterized by the \textit{Kepler} survey, and the empirical mass-radius relation by the subset of \textit{Kepler} planets with mass measurements. We combine the two in order to…
The solar system planetary architecture has been proposed to be consistent with the terrestrial and giant planets forming from material rings at ~1 au and ~5 au, respectively. Here, we show that super-Earths and mini-Neptunes may share a…
Although wheeled robots have been predominant for planetary exploration, their geometry limits their capabilities when traveling over steep slopes, through rocky terrains, and in microgravity. Legged robots equipped with grippers are a…
In recent years the number of exoplanets has grown considerably. The most successful techniques in these detections are the radial velocity (RV) and planetary transits techniques, the latter significantly advanced by the Kepler, K2 and,…
Space-based transit missions such as Kepler and TESS have demonstrated that planets are ubiquitous. However, the success of these missions heavily depends on ground-based radial velocity (RV) surveys, which combined with transit photometry…
In our solar system massive outer planets dominate in terms of both mass and angular momentum, but few such planets are among the more than 4000 currently confirmed exoplanets, and none of these have accurately determined densities. Here I…