Related papers: Laboratory Demonstration of an Active Optics Syste…

CubeSats are excellent platforms to rapidly perform simple space experiments. Several hundreds of CubeSats have already been successfully launched in the past few years and the number of announced launches grows every year. These platforms…

At a fraction the total cost of an equivalent orbital mission, scientific balloon-borne platforms, operating above 99.7% of the Earth's atmosphere, offer attractive, competitive, and effective observational capabilities -- namely space-like…

In this paper, we evaluate the viability of CubeSats as an attractive platform for lightweight instrumentation by describing a proof of concept CubeSat that houses an astrophotonic chip for transit spectroscopy-based exoplanet atmosphere…

An established technique for the measurement of ultra-high-energy-cosmic-rays is the detection of the fluorescence light induced in the atmosphere of the Earth, by means of telescopes equipped with photomultiplier tubes. Silicon…

Know thy star, know thy planet,... especially in the ultraviolet (UV). Over the past decade, that motto has grown from mere wish to necessity in the M dwarf regime, given that the intense and highly variable UV radiation from these stars is…

The Miniature X-ray Solar Spectrometer (MinXSS) is a 3-Unit (3U) CubeSat developed at the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics (LASP) at the University of Colorado, Boulder (CU). Over 40 students contributed to the project with…

The Australian Space Eye is a proposed astronomical telescope based on a 6U CubeSat platform. The Space Eye will exploit the low level of systematic errors achievable with a small space based telescope to enable high accuracy measurements…

Exploration of Mars has been made possible using a series of landers, rovers and orbiters. The HiRise camera on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) has captured high-resolution images covering large tracts of the surface. However, orbital…

Active optics techniques in astronomy provide high imaging quality. This paper is dedicated to highly deformable active optics that can generate non-axisymmetric aspheric surfaces-or freeform surfaces-by use of a minimum number of…

Hyperspectral imaging is a powerful tool for Earth exploration, allowing for detailed analysis of spectral features. India has launched a dedicated hyperspectral Earth observation satellite capable of capturing data across a wide…

Active optics techniques on large telescopes and astronomical instrumentations provide high imaging quality. For ground-based astronomy, the co-addition of adaptive optics again increases angular resolution up to provide diffraction-limited…

A limiting factor in the development of mid-infrared optics is the lack of abundant materials that are transparent, low cost, lightweight, and easy to machine. In this paper, we demonstrate a metasurface device that circumvents these…

After many years of flying in space primarily for educational purposes, CubeSats - tiny satellites with form factors corresponding to arrangements of "1U" units, or cubes, each 10 cm on a side - have come into their own as valuable…

A Drag-Free CubeSat mission has been proposed to demonstrate the feasibility of a Gravitational Reference Sensor (GRS) with an optical readout for a 3 units (3U) spacecraft. A purely drag-free object is defined by the absence of all…

Balloon-borne astronomy offers an attractive option for experiments that require precise pointing and attitude stabilization, due to a large reduction in the atmospheric interference observed by ground-based systems as well as the low-cost…

In this paper, we introduce a system based on transfer learning for detecting segment misalignment in multimirror satellites, such as future CubeSat designs and the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), using image-based methods. When a mirror…

High-Performance Adaptive Optics systems are rapidly spreading as useful applications in the fields of astronomy, ophthalmology, and telecommunications. This technology is critical to enable coronagraphic direct imaging of exoplanets…

We have realised a 4-beam pyramidal magneto-optical trap ideally suited for future microfabrication. Three mirrors split and steer a single incoming beam into a tripod of reflected beams, allowing trapping in the four-beam overlap volume.…

Traditional glass-based optics are typically optimized for narrow spectral bands, such as the visible (400-700nm) or shortwave infrared (1000-1800nm). While the emergence of VIS-SWIR sensors (400-1700nm) offers transformative potential,…

HERMES (High Energy Rapid Modular Ensemble of Satellites) is a space-borne mission based on a constellation of nano-satellites flying in a low-Earth orbit (LEO). The six 3U CubeSat buses host new miniaturized instruments hosting a hybrid…