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The detections of small, rocky exoplanets have surged in recent years and will likely continue to do so. To know whether a rocky exoplanet is habitable, we have to characterise its atmosphere and surface. A promising characterisation method…
Various structures are visible within Spectro-Polarimetric High-contrast Exoplanet REsearch instrument (SPHERE) images that are not always straightforward to interpret. In this article we present a review of these features and demonstrate…
The increasing demand for critical raw materials has revitalized interest in abandoned underground mines, which pose extreme challenges for conventional drilling machinery due to confined, unstructured, and infrastructure-less environments.…
Robotic spacecraft have helped expand our reach for many planetary exploration missions. Most ground mobile planetary exploration robots use wheeled or modified wheeled platforms. Although extraordinarily successful at completing intended…
The Sky Polarization Observatory (SPOrt) is presented as a project aimed to measure the diffuse sky polarized emission, from the International Space Station, in the frequency range 20-90 GHz with 7 degrees of HPBW. The SPOrt experimental…
Two decades ago, empirical evidence concerning the existence and frequency of planets around stars, other than our own, was absent. Since this time, the detection of extrasolar planets from Jupiter-sized to most recently Earth-sized worlds…
The radio environment of the Moon at low frequencies, particularly in lunar polar regions and the permanently shadowed regions (PSR) found there, is relatively poorly explored and may contain some novel features. In addition, these areas of…
The concept of a space elevator dates back to Tsilokovsky, but they are not commonly considered in near-term plans for space exploration, perhaps because a terrestrial elevator would not be possible without considerable improvements in…
Using a fully autonomous spacecraft - Bering - we propose to detect and study sub-km asteroids from an orbit within the asteroid Main Belt. The main purpose of the proposed Bering mission is to detect a statistically significant sample of…
In the last years, the Observatory of Padova (Istituto Nazionale di Astrofisica - Osservatorio Astronomico di Padova) and the University of Padova have been involved massively in projects dedicated to the exoplanets search, both ground, and…
The Photometric Observations of Exoplanet Transits (POET) is a proposed micro-satellite mission dedicated to the characterization and discovery of transiting exoplanets. POET has been identified as a top priority small-sat space mission in…
We assess the possibility of reducing the travel time of a crewed mission to Mars by examining four different propulsion methods and keeping the mass at departure under 2500 tonne, for a fixed architecture. We evaluated representative…
Caves and lava tubes on the Moon and Mars are sites of geological and astrobiological interest but consist of terrain that is inaccessible with traditional robot locomotion. To support the exploration of these sites, we present ReachBot, a…
Real-time analysis of Martian craters is crucial for mission-critical operations, including safe landings and geological exploration. This work leverages the latest breakthroughs for on-the-edge crater detection aboard spacecraft. We…
A potential crewed mission to Mars would require us to solve a number of problems, including how to protect astronauts against the devastating effects of energetic charged particles from Solar and Galactic sources. The radiation environment…
We investigate the prospects for the past or current existence of habitable conditions deep underneath the surfaces of the Moon and Mars as well as generic bound and free-floating extrasolar rocky objects. We construct a simple model that…
The current state of electronic component miniaturization coupled with the increasing efficiency in hardware and software allow the development of smaller and compact robotic systems. The convenience of using these small, simple, yet…
Microlensing is a proven extrasolar planet search method that has already yielded the detection of four exoplanets. These detections have changed our understanding of planet formation ``beyond the snowline'' by demonstrating that…
The diversity and quantity of moons in the Solar System suggest a manifold population of natural satellites exist around extrasolar planets. Of peculiar interest from an astrobiological perspective, the number of sizable moons in the…
In recent years, the Robot Operating System (ROS) is developing rapidly and has been widely used in robotics research because of its flexible, open source, and extensive advantages. In scientific research, the corresponding hardware…