Related papers: Extending Science from Lunar Laser Ranging

This research explores the enhancement of lunar landing precision through an advanced structured light system, integrating machine learning, Iterative Learning Control (ILC) and Structured Illumination Microscopy (SIM) techniques. By…

Strong lensing gravitational time delays are a powerful and cost effective probe of dark energy. Recent studies have shown that a single lens can provide a distance measurement with 6-7 % accuracy (including random and systematic…

Nowadays, static, mobile, terrestrial, and airborne laser scanning technologies have become familiar data sources for engineering work, especially in the area of land surveying. The diversity of Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) data…

By volume, more than 99% of the solar system has not been imaged at radio frequencies. Almost all of this space (the solar wind) can be traversed by fast electrons producing radio emissions at frequencies lower than the terrestrial…

In recent years, the Moon has emerged as an unparalleled extraterrestrial testbed for advancing cuttingedge technological and scientific research critical to enabling sustained human presence on its surface and supporting future…

The next decade of survey astronomy has the potential to transform our knowledge of variable stars. Stellar variability underpins our knowledge of the cosmological distance ladder, and provides direct tests of stellar formation and…

Due to ionosphere absorption and the interference by natural and artificial radio emissions, astronomical observation from the ground becomes very difficult at the wavelengths of decametre or longer, which we shall refer as the ultralong…

We investigate the effects of extended multi-year light curves (9-year photometry and 5-year spectroscopy) on the detection of time lags between the continuum variability and broad-line response of quasars at z>~1.5, and compare with the…

We address the problem of estimating realistic, spatially varying reflectance for complex planetary surfaces such as the lunar regolith, which is critical for high-fidelity rendering and vision-based navigation. Existing lunar rendering…

Solar flares, as one of the most prominent manifestations of solar activity, have a profound impact on both the Earth's space environment and human activities. As a result, accurate solar flare prediction has emerged as a central topic in…

Planetary rover missions must utilize machine learning-based perception to continue extra-terrestrial exploration with little to no human presence. Martian terrain segmentation has been critical for rover navigation and hazard avoidance to…

Crater counting on the Moon and other bodies is crucial to constrain the dynamical history of the Solar System. This has traditionally been done by visual inspection of images, thus limiting the scope, efficiency, and/or accuracy of…

At the Royal Society meeting in 2023, we have mainly presented our lunar orbit array concept called DSL, and also briefly introduced a concept of a lunar surface array, LARAF. As the DSL concept had been presented before, in this article we…

In 1970, the Soviet Lunokhod 1 rover delivered a French-built laser reflector to the Moon. Although a few range measurements were made within three months of its landing, these measurements---and any that may have followed---are unpublished…

A decreasing gravitational constant, G, coupled with angular momentum conservation is expected to increrase a planetary semimajor axis, a, as \dot a/a=-\dot G/G. Analysis of lunar laser ranging data strongly limits such temporal variations…

The Laser Interferometer Lunar Antenna (LILA) is a next-generation gravitational-wave (GW) facility on the Moon. By harnessing the Moon's unique environment, LILA fills a critical observational gap in the mid-band GW spectrum ($0.1 - 10$…

A new analysis of extended data records collected with the Lunar Laser Ranging (LLR) technique performed with improved tidal models was not able to resolve the issue of the anomalous rate $\dot e$ of the eccentricity $e$ of the orbit of the…

We deal with the attempts to measure the Lense-Thirring effect with the Satellite Laser Ranging (SLR) technique applied to the existing LAGEOS and LAGEOS II terrestrial satellites and to the recently approved LARES spacecraft.The first…

Laser-ranging satellites have proved their efficiency in high precision testing of General Relativity and constraining modified gravity theories proposed to explain the dark sector and the cosmological tensions. The LARES 2 satellite…

The use of Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) to increase spacecraft autonomy for orbit determination has gained renewed momentum following the Lunar GNSS Receiver Experiment (LuGRE), which demonstrated feasible onboard GPS and…