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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…
The number of small satellites has grown dramatically in the past decade from tens of satellites per year in the mid-2010s to a projection of tens of thousands in orbit by the mid-2020s. This presents both problems and opportunities for…
Exoplanetary science has reached a historic moment. The James Webb Space Telescope will be capable of probing the atmospheres of rocky planets, and perhaps even search for biologically produced gases. However this is contingent on…
Laboratory astrophysics and complementary theoretical calculations are the foundations of astronomy and astrophysics and will remain so into the foreseeable future. The mission enabling impact of laboratory astrophysics ranges from the…
Nowadays many telescopes around the world are automated and some networks of robotic telescopes are active or planned as shown by the lists we draw up. Such equipment could be used for the training of students and for science in the…
While it may seem counterintuitive that X-ray astronomy should give any insights into low-temperature planetary systems, planets orbit stars whose magnetized surfaces divert a small fraction of the stellar energy into high energy products:…
The Decadal Survey of Astronomy and Astrophysics created five panels to identify the science themes that would define the field's research frontiers in the coming decade. I will describe the conclusions of one of these, the Panel on…
Time-series photometry from space in the ultraviolet can be presently done with only a few platforms, none of which is able to provide wide-field long-term high-cadence photometry. We present a concept of UVSat, a twin space telescope which…
The goal of finding and characterizing habitable planets in other solar systems represents one of humanity's greatest scientific challenges. NASA and ESA have initiated studies of missions that could accomplish this goal within the next ten…
The scientific interest in directly image and identifying Earth-like planets within the Habitable Zone (HZ) around nearby stars is driving the design of specialized direct imaging mission such as ACESAT, EXO-C, EXO-S and AFTA-C. The inner…
An important evolutionary pathway for planetary atmospheres is escape to space, which has been studied on Earth and Mars for several decades and more recently in exoplanets. A particularly important regime is the hydrodynamic escape,…
The Hubble Space Telescope (HST), in its thirteen years of operation, has allowed us to observe properties of the universe humans have been able, until very recently, to probe only with their thoughts. This review presents a brief summary…
This white paper describes the NASA Infrared Telescope Facility, its capabilities, and its role in current and future research in planetary astronomy.
The Astro2020 Decadal Survey recognizes time-domain astronomy as a key science area over the next decade and beyond. With over 30 years of HST data and the potential for 20 years of JWST operations, these flagship observatories offer an…
The new generation of ground-based, large-aperture solar telescopes promises to significantly increase our capabilities to understand the many basic phenomena taking place in the Sun at all atmospheric layers and how they relate to each…
Over the past several decades, thousands of planets have been discovered outside of our Solar System. These planets exhibit enormous diversity, and their large numbers provide a statistical opportunity to place our Solar System within the…
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…
After the success of the refurbishment mission to HST in December 1993, the telescope has taken its place at the very leading edge of astrophysical research. The breadth and depth of the topics covered at the HST conference in Paris in…
The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope (Roman), NASA's next flagship observatory, has significant mission time to be spent on surveys for general astrophysics in addition to its three core community surveys. We considered what types of…
We recommend a conceptual design study for a spectroscopic facility in the southern hemisphere comprising a large diameter telescope, fiber system, and spectrographs collectively optimized for massively-multiplexed spectroscopy. As a…