Related papers: The Design of a Space-based Observation and Tracki…
The detections of 1I/Oumuamua and 2I/Borisov within just two years demonstrate impressively that interstellar objects (ISOs) must be common in the Milky Way. Once released from their parent system, these ISOs travel for Gyr through…
Solar system object P/2010 A2 is the first-noticed example of the aftermath of a recently disrupted asteroid, probably resulting from a collision. Nearly a year elapsed between its inferred initiation in early 2009 and its eventual…
As part of NASA's mission to explore habitable planets orbiting nearby stars, this paper explores the detection and characterization capabilities of a 4-m space telescope plus 50-m starshade located at the Earth-Sun L2 point, a.k.a. the New…
We present a new space mission concept that is capable of finding, detecting, and tracking 90% of near-Earth objects (NEO) with H magnitude of $\rm H\leq22$ (i.e., $\sim$140 m in size) that are potentially hazardous to the Earth. The new…
Organized Autotelescopes for Serendipitous Event Survey (OASES) is an optical observation project that aims to detect and investigate stellar occultation events by kilometer-sized trans-Neptunian objects (TNOs). In this project, multiple…
Since July 2014, the ESA Gaia mission has been surveying the entire sky down to magnitude 20.7 in the visible. In addition to the millions of stars, thousands of Solar System Objects (SSOs) are observed daily. By comparing their positions…
Nomadic worlds, i.e., objects not gravitationally bound to any star(s), are of great interest to planetary science and astrobiology. They have garnered attention recently due to constraints derived from microlensing surveys and the recent…
Most major discoveries in astronomy are unplanned, and result from surveying the Universe in a new way, rather than by testing a hypothesis or conducting an investigation with planned outcomes. For example, of the 10 greatest discoveries…
We present design considerations for a ground-based survey for transiting exoplanets around L and T dwarfs, spectral classes that have yet to be thoroughly probed for planets. We simulate photometry for L and T targets with a variety of…
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…
Despite extensive searches and the relative proximity of solar system objects (SSOS) to Earth, many remain undiscovered and there is still much to learn about their properties and interactions. This work is the first in a series dedicated…
We describe the motivation, design, and early results for our 42-night, 125 star Subaru/SCExAO direct imaging survey for planets around accelerating stars. Unlike prior large surveys, ours focuses only on stars showing evidence for an…
In studies of the oldest solar system bodies - comets and asteroids - it is their fragments - meteoroids - that provide the most accessible planetary material for detailed laboratory analysis in the form of dust particles or meteorites.…
The accumulating, but small, set of large semi-major axis trans-Neptunian objects (TNOs) shows an apparent clustering in the orientations of their orbits. This clustering must either be representative of the intrinsic distribution of these…
The discoveries of two Interstellar Objects (ISOs) in recent years has generated significant interest in constraining their physical properties and the mechanisms behind their formation. However, their ephemeral passages through our Solar…
The longitudes of perihelia and orbital poles of the solar system's dozen or so most remote detected objects are clustered in a manner inconsistent with that of a random sample of uniformly distributed orbits. While small number statistics…
Searching for exoplanets with different methods has always been the focus of astronomers over the past few years. Among multiple planet detection techniques, astrometry stands out for its capability to accurately determine the orbital…
By targeting nearby M dwarfs, a transit search using modest equipment is capable of discovering planets as small as 2 Earth radii in the habitable zones of their host stars. The MEarth Project, a future transit search, aims to employ a…
All-sky imaging surveys have identified several dozen isolated planetary-mass objects (IPMOs), far away from any star. Here, we examine the prospects for detecting transiting moons around these objects. We expect transiting moons to be…
We present a method to identify distant solar system objects in long-term wide-field asteroid survey data, and conduct a search for them in the Pan-STARRS1 (PS1) image data acquired from 2010 to mid-2015. We demonstrate that our method is…