Related papers: The future of astronomy with small satellites

This article aims to highlight the impact for ground based astronomical observations in different windows of the electromagnetic spectrum coming from the deployment of fleets of telecommunications satellites. A particular attention is given…

Despite the large budgets spent annually on astronomical research equipment such as telescopes, instruments and supercomputers, the general trend is to analyse and view the resulting datasets using small, two-dimensional displays. We report…

The field of gamma-ray astronomy has experienced impressive progress over the last decade. Thanks to the advent of a new generation of imaging air Cherenkov telescopes (H.E.S.S., MAGIC, VERITAS) and thanks to the launch of the Fermi-LAT…

Astrometry as a technique has so far proved of limited utility when employed as either a follow-up tool or to independently search for planetary mass companions orbiting nearby stars. However, this is bound to change during the next decade.…

Contemporary astronomy benefits of very large and rapidly growing amounts of data in all bands of the electromagnetic spectrum, from long-wavelength radio waves to high energy gamma-rays. Astronomers normally specialize in data taken in one…

The last two decades have seen the number of known exoplanets increase from a small handful to nearly 2000 known exoplanets, thousands more planet candidates, and several upcoming missions that are expected to further increase the…

The performance of optical clocks has strongly progressed in recent years, and accuracies and instabilities of 1 part in 10^18 are expected in the near future. The operation of optical clocks in space provides new scientific and…

Astrophysical measurements away from the 1 AU orbit of Earth can enable several astrophysical science cases that are challenging or impossible to perform from Earthbound platforms, including: building a detailed understanding of the…

Recent X-ray observations have had a major impact on topics ranging from protostars to cosmology. They have also drawn attention to important and general physical processes that currently limit our understanding of thermal and nonthermal…

Advances in astronomy are often enabled by adoption of new technology. In some instances this is where the technology has been invented specifically for astronomy, but more usually it is adopted from another scientific or industrial area of…

Astrophotonics is a burgeoning field that lies at the interface of photonics and modern astronomical instrumentation. Here we provide a pedagogical review of basic photonic functions that enable modern instruments, and give an overview of…

Astrophotonics lies at the interface of astronomy and photonics. This burgeoning field -- now formally recognized by the optics community -- has emerged over the past decade in response to the increasing demands of astronomical…

Space observatories are having major impacts on our knowledge of the Universe, from the Solar neighborhood to the cosmological background, opening many new windows out of reach to ground-based observatories. Celestial objects emit all over…

Space debris is a major threat to the satellite infrastructure. A collision with even small particle, e.g. 1 cm of size, can cause a catastrophic event when the parent body, spacecraft or upper stage, will break up into hundreds of…

October 1957, and the successful launch of Sputnik 1 into Earth orbit, marked the dawn of the Space Age. The first of the 'fellow travellers' - humanity's first artificial satellite - orbited for a mere three months before re-entering the…

Over the next decade we will witness the development of a new infrastructure in support of data-intensive scientific research, which includes Astronomy. This new networked environment will offer both challenges and opportunities to our…

We look at what astronomy from the Moon might be like in the visible over the next few decades. The Moon offers the possibility of installing large telescopes or interferometers with instruments larger than those on orbiting telescopes. We…

Some attempts to predict the very distant future of Radio Astronomy are given. It is not easy to predict a list of the first priority problems which may appear, but the facilities potential is more predictable. It is suggested, that in…

Started approximately in the late 1980s, exoplanetology has up to now unveiled the main gross bulk characteristics of planets and planetary systems. In the future it will benefit from more and more large telescopes and advanced space…

Scientific research is a continuous process, and the speed of future progress can be estimated by the pace of finding explanations for previous research questions. In this observers based view of stellar pulsation and asteroseismology, we…