Related papers: Tether Capture of spacecraft at Neptune
The NEAT (Nearby Earth Astrometric Telescope) mission is a proposition submitted to ESA for its 2010 call for M-size mission. The main scientific goal is to detect and characterize planetary systems in an exhaustive way down to 1 Earth mass…
Disk-fed accretion onto neutron stars can power a wide range of astrophysical sources ranging from X-ray binaries, to accretion powered millisecond pulsars, ultra-luminous X-ray sources, and gamma-ray bursts. A crucial parameter controlling…
The Neptunian satellite system is unusual. The major satellites of Jupiter, Saturn, and Uranus are all in prograde, low-inclination orbits. Neptune on the other hand, has the fewest satellites, and most of the system's mass is within one…
The Cassini-Huygens mission has transformed our understanding of Titan from a hazy veiled moon to a place surprisingly like the Earth, with terrestrial physical processes such as wind, rainfall, and erosion shaping the landscape albeit with…
Modeling the formation of the ice giants Uranus and Neptune is a long-lasting problem in planetary science. Due to gas-drag, collisional damping, and resonant shepherding, the planetary embryos repel the planetesimals away from their reach…
We study the radial and vertical stability of dust grains launched with all charge-to-mass ratios at arbitrary distances from rotating planets with complex magnetic fields. We show that the aligned dipole magnetic field model analyzed by…
The existence of Planet Nine has been suggested to explain the pericenter clustering of extreme trans-Neptunian objects (TNOs). However, the underlying dynamics involving Planet Nine, test particles and Neptune is rich, and it remains…
Interstellar transport is an object of interest in many sci-fi stories. In history a lot of sci-fi predictions have turned into reality, such as communications satellites, deep-sea submarines and journies to the moon. In this work we study…
Hot Jupiters can experience mass loss driven by heating from UV radiation from their host stars, and this flow is often controlled by magnetic fields. More specifically, near the planetry surface, the magnetic pressure dominates the ram…
We use a secular representation to describe the long-term dynamics of transneptunian objects in mean-motion resonance with Neptune. The model applied is thoroughly described in Saillenfest et al. (2016). The parameter space is…
Evidence from the solar system suggests that, unlike Venus and Mars, the presence of a strong magnetic dipole moment on Earth has helped maintain liquid water on its surface. Therefore, planetary magnetism could have a significant effect on…
The Solar Gravitational Lens (SGL) enables resolved imaging and spectroscopy of nearby terrestrial exoplanets, but useful science begins only after a spacecraft reaches roughly 650-900 astronomical units (AU). A 20 yr lower-bound trip to…
The transport on top of a periodic two-dimensional hexagonal magnetic pattern of (i) a single macroscopic steel sphere, (ii) a doublet of wax/magnetite composite spheres, and (iii) an immiscible mixture of ferrofluid droplets with a…
Surveys reveal that terrestrial- to Neptune-sized planets (1 $< R <$ 4 R$_{\rm{Earth}}$) are the most common type of planets in our galaxy. Detecting and characterizing such small planets around nearby stars holds the key to understanding…
Theories of the formation and early evolution of planetary systems postulate that planets are born in circumstellar disks, and undergo radial migration during and after dissipation of the dust and gas disk from which they formed. The…
New insights on stellar evolution and stellar interiors physics are being made possible by asteroseismology. Throughout the course of the Kepler mission, asteroseismology has also played an important role in the characterization of…
The Solar System Odyssey mission uses modern-day high-precision experimental techniques to test the laws of fundamental physics which determine dynamics in the solar system. It could lead to major discoveries by using demonstrated…
Plasma rotation plays a large role in determining the size and shape of Saturn's disc-like magnetosphere. A magnetosphere more confined to the equator in the polar regions is expected as a result of the interaction between this type of…
Remote sensing observations suffer significant limitations when used to study the bulk atmospheric composition of the giant planets of our solar system. This impacts our knowledge of the formation of these planets and the physics of their…
Herschel-PACS measurements of the rotational R(0) and R(1) HD lines in the atmospheres of Uranus and Neptune are analyzed in order to derive a D/H ratio with improved precision for both planets. The derivation of the D/H ratio includes also…