Related papers: Starshade formation flying I: optical sensing
A telescope specifically designed for the observation of the stellar aberration of light is proposed. It is distinctive in two main features: a lengthy collimated beam and an adjustable position of the photo-detector along the telescope…
Orbit determination of spacecraft in orbit has been mostly dependent on either GNSS satellite signals or ground station telemetry. Both methods present their limitations, however: GNSS signals can only be used effectively in earth orbit,…
The fields of occultation and microlensing are linked historically. Early this century, occultation of the Sun by the Moon allowed the apparent positions of background stars projected near the limb of the Sun to be measured and compared…
The ultimate astronomical observatory would be a formation flying interferometer in space, immune to atmospheric turbulence and absorption, free from atmospheric and telescope thermal emission, and reconfigurable to adjust baselines…
Flying Triangulation sensors enable a free-hand and motion-robust 3D data acquisition of complex shaped objects. The measurement principle is based on a multi-line light-sectioning approach and uses sophisticated algorithms for real-time…
Launching a starshade to rendezvous with the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope would provide the first opportunity to directly image the habitable zones of nearby sunlike stars in the coming decade. A report on the science and feasibility…
We present the results of a study along with a first prototype of a high precision system (? 1 arcsec) for pointing and tracking light (near-infrared) telescopes on board stratospheric balloons. Such a system is essentially composed by a…
We propose an approach to detect flying objects such as UAVs and aircrafts when they occupy a small portion of the field of view, possibly moving against complex backgrounds, and are filmed by a camera that itself moves. Solving such a…
The impact of large-scale constellations of satellites, is a concern for ground-based astronomers. In recent years there has been a significant increase in the number of satellites in Low-Earth Orbit and this trend is set to continue. The…
Relative astrometric shifts between multiply lensed images provide a valuable tool to investigate haloes in the intergalactic space. In strong lens systems in which a single lens plays the primary role in producing multiple images, the…
Star trackers are primarily optical devices that are used to estimate the attitude of a spacecraft by recognising and tracking star patterns. Currently, most star trackers use conventional optical sensors. In this application paper, we…
In order to understand the nature of the lenses that generate microlensing events, one would like to measure their mass, distance, and velocity. Unfortunately, current microlensing experiments measure only one parameter of the events, the…
We demonstrate that microlensing can be used for detecting planets in binary stellar systems. This is possible because in the geometry of planetary binary systems where the planet orbits one of the binary component and the other binary star…
Detecting compact objects by means of their gravitational lensing effect on an observed companion in a binary system has already been suggested almost four decades ago. However, these predictions were made even before the first observations…
The Telescope to Observe Planetary Systems (TOPS) is a proposed space mission to image in the visible (0.4-0.9 micron) planetary systems of nearby stars simultaneously in 16 spectral bands (resolution R~20). For the ~10 most favorable…
The light deflection of one component of a binary system due to the gravitational field of the other component is investigated. While this relativistic effect has not been observed thus far, the question arises that whether this effect…
The Planet Hunting and Asteroseismology Explorer Spectrophotometer, PHASES, is a concept for a space-borne instrument to obtain flux calibrated spectra and measure micro-magnitude photometric variations of nearby stars. The science drivers…
Interstellar communications are achievable with gram-scale spacecraft using swarm techniques introduced herein if an adequate energy source, clocks and a suitable communications protocol exist. The essence of our approach to the…
Space debris is a major threat to the satellite infrastructure. A collision with even small particle, e.g. 1 cm of size, can cause a catastrophic event when the parent body, spacecraft or upper stage, will break up into hundreds of…
In this paper we introduce a new observable to measure cosmic shear. We show that if we can measure with good accuracy both, the orientation of a galaxy and the polarisation direction of its radio emission, the angle between them is…