Related papers: Enabling Deep All-Sky Searches of Outer Solar Syst…
Among the group of extrasolar planets, transiting planets provide a great opportunity to obtain direct measurements for the basic physical properties, such as mass and radius of these objects. These planets are therefore highly important in…
The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), currently scheduled to launch in 2021, will dramatically advance our understanding of exoplanetary systems with its ability to directly image and characterise planetary-mass companions at wide…
The previous decade saw the discovery of the first four known interstellar objects due to advances in astronomical viewing equipment. Future sky surveys with greater sensitivity will allow for more frequent detections of such objects,…
The Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) that will be carried out by the NSF-DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory promises to be the defining survey of the next decade, supplying unprecedented access to the night sky to static science- and…
The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is a large (6.6m), cold (50K), infrared-optimized space observatory that will be launched early in the next decade. The observatory will have four instruments: a near-infrared camera, a near-infrared…
The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) will use an active optics system (AOS) to maintain alignment and surface figure on its three large mirrors. Corrective actions fed to the LSST AOS are determined from information derived from 4…
We run simulations to determine the expected distribution of orbital elements of nearly isotropic comets (NICs) in the outer solar system, assuming that these comets originate in the Oort Cloud at thousands of AU and are perturbed into the…
The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) will search for planets transiting bright and nearby stars. TESS has been selected by NASA for launch in 2017 as an Astrophysics Explorer mission. The spacecraft will be placed into a highly…
Recent observational surveys of the outer Solar System provide evidence that Neptune's distant $n$:1 mean-motion resonances may harbor relatively large reservoirs of trans-Neptunian objects (TNOs). In particular, the discovery of two…
Optical polarimetry provides information on the geometry of the emitting region, the magnetic field configuration and the properties of dust in astrophysical sources. Current state-of-the-art instruments typically have a small field of view…
The Legacy Survey of Space and Time, to be conducted with the Vera C. Rubin Observatory, is poised to revolutionize our understanding of the Solar System by providing an unprecedented wealth of data on various objects, including the elusive…
The Near-Earth Object (NEO) Surveyor mission is a NASA observatory designed to discover and characterize near-Earth asteroids and comets. The mission's primary objective is to find the majority of objects large enough to cause severe…
This article summarizes a workshop held on March, 2014, on the potential of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) to revolutionize our knowledge of the physical properties of exoplanets through transit observations. JWST's unique…
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…
Euclid and the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) are poised to dramatically change the astronomy landscape early in the next decade. The combination of high cadence, deep, wide-field optical photometry from LSST with high resolution,…
The vast diversity of planetary systems detected to date is defying our capability of understanding their formation and evolution. Well-defined volume-limited surveys are the best tool at our disposal to tackle the problem, via the…
The boundary of solar system object discovery lies in detecting its faintest members. However, their discovery in detection catalogs from imaging surveys is fundamentally limited by the practice of thresholding detections at signal-to-noise…
For the first time in history, humans have reached the point where it is possible to construct a revolutionary space-based observatory that has the capability to find dozens of Earth-like worlds, and possibly some with signs of life. This…
Among solar system objects, comets coming from the Oort Cloud are an elusive population, intrinsically rare and difficult to detect. Nonetheless, as the more pristine objects we can observe, they encapsulate critical cues on the formation…
A major scientific goal of JWST is to probe the epoch of re-ionization of the Universe at z above 6, and up to 20 and beyond. At these redshifts, galaxies are just beginning to form and the observable objects are early black holes,…