Related papers: On the Use of Planetary Science Data for Studying …
The NASA Exoplanet Archive and the Exoplanet Follow-up Observing Program service are two widely used resources for the exoplanet community. The NASA Exoplanet Archive provides a complete and accurate accounting of exoplanetary systems…
Given that observational and numerical climate data are being produced at ever more prodigious rates, increasingly sophisticated and automated analysis techniques have become essential. Deep learning is quickly becoming a standard approach…
X-ray observatories contribute fundamental advances in Solar System studies by probing Sun-object interactions, developing planet and satellite surface composition maps, probing global magnetospheric dynamics, and tracking astrochemical…
Whereas the Solar System has Mars and Europa as the best candidates for finding fossil/extant life as we know it - based on complex carbon compounds and liquid water - the 263 (non-pulsar) planetary systems around other stars as known at 15…
Upcoming NASA astrophysics missions such as the James Webb Space Telescope will search for signs of life on planets transiting nearby stars. Doing so will require co-adding dozens of transmission spectra to build up sufficient signal to…
Solar system exploration provides numerous possibilities for advancing technosignature science. The search for life in the solar system includes missions designed to search for evidence of biosignatures on other planetary bodies, but many…
The discovery of extrasolar planets is one of the major scientific advances of the last two decades. Hundreds of planets have now been detected and astronomers are beginning to characterise their composition and physical characteristics. To…
Exoplanetary science has reached a historic moment. The James Webb Space Telescope will be capable of probing the atmospheres of rocky planets, and perhaps even search for biologically produced gases. However this is contingent on…
Astronomy produces extremely large data sets from ground-based telescopes, space missions, and simulation. The volume and complexity of these rich data sets require new approaches and advanced tools to understand the information contained…
Exoplanets are abundant in our galaxy and yet characterizing them remains a technical challenge. Solar System planets provide an opportunity to test the practical limitations of exoplanet observations with high signal-to-noise data that we…
FINESSE, a NASA MIDEX mission in Step 2, would conduct a large, uniform survey of exoplanet atmospheres and create a statistically significant sample for comparative planetology. FINESSE's technical capabilities, driven by a scientific…
This report summarizes the current status of efforts to develop the technologies required for coronographic space missions aimed at the detection of terrestrial extrasolar planets.
Astronomy is at times a science of unexpected discovery. When it is, and if we are lucky, new intellectual territories emerge to challenge our views of the cosmos. The recent indirect detections using high-precision Doppler spectroscopy of…
We point out some advantages of making observations of extrasolar planets in linearly polarized (LP) light. Older cool stars have quite low levels (~ 10^-4 to 10^-5) of fractional LP, while extrasolar planets can have relatively high…
Activities related to access to astronomical facilities and data could offer an effective, entry-level path for outreach and astronomy education. The Government of Italy proposed the Open Universe initiative that was adopted by the United…
The last two decades have seen remarkable progress in our long-standing goal of determining the abundance and diversity of worlds in the Galaxy. Understanding of this subject involves tracing the path of interstellar material from dense…
Planets reflect and linearly polarize the radiation that they receive from their host stars. The emergent polarization is sensitive to aspects of the planet atmosphere such as the gas composition and the occurrence of condensates and their…
I describe ongoing work on development of Bayesian methods for exploring periodically varying phenomena in astronomy, addressing two classes of sources: pulsars, and extrasolar planets (exoplanets). For pulsars, the methods aim to detect…
The discovery of the first extra-solar planet surrounding a main-sequence star was announced in 1995, based on very precise radial velocity (Doppler) measurements. A total of 34 such planets were known by the end of March 2000, and their…
Ambitious studies of Earth-like extrasolar planets are outlined in the context of an exploration initiative for a return to the Earth's Moon. Two mechanism for linearly polarizing light reflected from Earth-like planets are discussed: 1)…