Related papers: Volatile Sample Return in the Solar System
Several physical mechanisms are involved in excavating granular materials beneath a vertical jet of gas. These occur, for example, beneath the exhaust plume of a rocket landing on the soil of the Moon or Mars. A series of experiments and…
The key goals of the astrobiology community are to identify environments beyond Earth that may be habitable, and to search for signs of life in those environments. A fundamental aspect of understanding the limits of habitable environments…
The Milky Way Galaxy is literally teeming with exoplanets; thousands of planets have been discovered, with thousands more planet candidates identified. Terrestrial-like planets are quite common around other stars, and are expected to be…
Solar System observations that serve as analogs for exoplanet remote sensing data can provide important opportunities to validate ideas and models related to exoplanet environments. Critically, and unlike true exoplanet observations, Solar…
We survey the basic principles of atmospheric dynamics relevant to explaining existing and future observations of exoplanets, both gas giant and terrestrial. Given the paucity of data on exoplanet atmospheres, our approach is to emphasize…
We consider the problem of spatiotemporal sampling in which an initial state $f$ of an evolution process $f_t=A_tf$ is to be recovered from a combined set of coarse samples from varying time levels $\{t_1,\dots,t_N\}$. This new way of…
Terrestrial planets in temperate orbits around very low mass stars are likely to have evolved in a very different way than solar system planets, and in particular Earth. However, because these are the first planets that are and will be…
Transmission spectroscopy is still the preferred characterization technique for exoplanet atmospheres, although it presents unique challenges that translate into characterization bottlenecks when robust mitigation strategies are missing.…
We discuss the in-flight autonomous assembly as the means to build advanced planetary science payloads to explore the outer regions of the solar system. These payloads are robotically constructed from modular parts delivered by a group of…
A major goal in the discovery and characterisation of exoplanets is to identify terrestrial-type worlds that are similar to (or otherwise distinct from) our Earth. Recent results have highlighted the importance of applying devolatilisation…
Addressing multi-modality constitutes one of the major challenges of sampling. In this reflection paper, we advocate for a more systematic evaluation of samplers towards two sources of difficulty that are mode separation and dimension. For…
With the recent discoveries of hundreds of extrasolar planets, the search for planets like Earth and life in the universe, is quickly gaining momentum. In the future, large space observatories could directly detect the light scattered from…
A wealth of Earth-sized exoplanets will be discovered in the coming years, proving a large pool of candidates from which the targets for the search for life beyond the Solar system will be chosen. The target selection process will require…
The Venus Life Finder Missions are a series of focused astrobiology mission concepts to search for habitability, signs of life, and life itself in the Venus atmosphere. While people have speculated on life in the Venus clouds for decades,…
In this work the orbital dynamics of Earth satellites about the geosynchronous altitude are explored, with primary goal to assess current mitigation guidelines as well as to discuss the future exploitation of the region. A thorough…
In this paper we consider the nonlinear inverse problem of phase retrieval in the context of dynamical sampling. Where phase retrieval deals with the recovery of signals & images from phaseless measurements, dynamical sampling was…
Recently, we witnessed how the synergy of small satellite technology and solar sailing propulsion enables new missions. Together, small satellites with lightweight instruments and solar sails offer affordable access to deep regions of the…
The exploration of small bodies in the Solar System is a high priority planetary science. Asteroids, comets, and planetary moons yield important information about the evolution of the Solar System. Additionally, they could provide resources…
We use importance sampling in a redefined way to highlight and investigate rare events in the form of trajectories trapped inside a target coherent set. We take a transfer operator approach to finding these sets on a reconstructed…
We are now on a clear trajectory for improvements in exoplanet observations that will revolutionize our ability to characterize their atmospheric structure, composition, and circulation, from gas giants to rocky planets. However, exoplanet…