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The Ice Giants represent a unique and relatively poorly characterized class of planets that have been largely unexplored since the brief Voyager 2 flyby in the late 1980's. Uranus is particularly enigmatic, due to its extreme axial tilt,…

The climate crisis we are facing calls for significant improvements in our understanding of natural phenomena, with clouds being identified as a dominant source of uncertainty. To this end, the emerging field of 3D computed cloud tomography…

[Abridged] It is expected that the ongoing and future space-borne planet survey missions including TESS, PLATO, and Earth 2.0 will detect thousands of small to medium-sized planets via the transit technique, including over a hundred…

The NEAT (Nearby Earth Astrometric Telescope) mission is a proposal submitted to ESA for its 2010 call for M-size mission within the Cosmic Vision 2015-2025 plan. The main scientific goal of the NEAT mission is to detect and characterize…

We present SHINeS, a space simulator which can be used to replicate the thermal environment in the immediate neighborhood of the Sun down to a heliocentric distance r~0.06 au. The system consists of three main parts: the solar simulator…

The field of exoplanetary science is making rapid progress both in statistical studies of exoplanet properties as well as in individual characterization. As space missions provide an emerging picture of formation and evolution of…

Understanding the climates of terrestrial exoplanets and the detectability of biosignatures is an inherently interdisciplinary challenge, requiring the integration of insights from Solar System exploration, exoplanet observations and…

Results from recent space missions, in particular Spitzer and Herschel, have lead to significant progress in our understanding of the formation and transport of water from clouds to disks, planetesimals, and planets. In this review, we…

Earth is the only planet known to harbor life and, as a result, the search for habitable and inhabited planets beyond the Solar System commonly focuses on analogs to our planet. However, Earth's atmosphere and surface environment have…

The habitable fraction of a planet's surface is important for the detectability of surface biosignatures. The extent and distribution of habitable areas is influenced by external parameters that control the planet's climate, atmospheric…

The international planetary science community met in London in January 2020, united in the goal of realising the first dedicated robotic mission to the distant Ice Giants, Uranus and Neptune, as the only major class of Solar System planet…

The Gaia satellite will survey the entire celestial sphere down to 20th magnitude, obtaining astrometry, photometry, and low resolution spectrophotometry on one billion astronomical sources, plus radial velocities for over one hundred…

The quest for Earth-like planets represents a major focus of current exoplanet research. While planets that are Earth-sized and smaller have been detected, these planets reside in orbits that are too close to their host star to allow liquid…

Two circumbinary planets have been recently discovered by TESS. The main aim of this work is to explore whether it is possible, besides the discovered circumbinary planet, to have an Earth-like planet within the habitable zone of the…

Solid body tides provide key information on the interior structure, evolution, and origin of the planetary bodies. Our Solar system harbours a very diverse population of planetary bodies, including those composed of rock, ice, gas, or a…

THESEUS is a space mission concept, currently under Phase A study by ESA as candidate M5 mission, aiming at exploiting Gamma-Ray Bursts for investigating the early Universe and at providing a substantial advancement of multi-messenger and…

We obtained deep Gemini GMOS-S $g,r$ photometry of the ultra-faint dwarf galaxy candidate Cetus II with the aim of providing stronger constraints on its size, luminosity and stellar population. Cetus II is an important object in the…

In the future interstellar exploration at near-relativistic speeds will be possible using beamed energy laser propulsion. With this, spacecraft as small as gm mass picospacecraft become candidates for the exploration of deep space, with a…

Earth will become uninhabitable within 2-3 Gyr as a result of the moving boundaries of the habitable zone caused by the increasing luminosity of the Sun. Predictions about the future of habitable conditions on Earth include a decline in…

TESS is finding transiting planet candidates around bright, nearby stars across the entire sky. The large field-of-view, however, results in low spatial resolution, therefore multiple stars contribute to almost every TESS light curve.…