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Wheeled ground robots are limited from exploring extreme environments such as caves, lava tubes and skylights. Small robots that can utilize unconventional mobility through hopping, flying or rolling can overcome these limitations.…
We describe how meteors recorded at the Earth can be used to partly reconstruct the meteoroid environments of the planets if a large sample (i.e. millions of orbits at a minimum) is available. The process involves selecting from the…
This work presents an experimental design for studying low-velocity collisions into granular surfaces in low-gravity. In the experiment apparatus, reduced-gravity is simulated by releasing a free-falling projectile into a surface container…
It has been 20 years since planning began for the 1995 United Nations International Conference on Near-Earth Objects. The conference proceedings established the scientific basis for an international organizational framework to support…
We have created a new image analysis pipeline to reprocess images taken by the Near Earth Asteroid Tracking survey and have applied it to ten nights of observations. This work is the first large-scale reprocessing of images from an asteroid…
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…
The number of planetary satellites around solid objects in the inner Solar System is small either because they are difficult or unlikely to form, or that they do not survive for astronomical timescales. Here we conduct a pilot study on the…
The recent observation of interstellar objects, 1I/Oumuamua and 2I/Borisov cross the solar system opened new opportunities for planetary science and planetary defense. As the first confirmed objects originating outside of the solar system,…
In the future interstellar exploration at near-relativistic speeds will be possible using beamed energy laser propulsion. With this, spacecraft as small as gm mass picospacecraft become candidates for the exploration of deep space, with a…
Upcoming space-based coronagraphic instruments in the next decade will perform reflected light spectroscopy and photometry of cool, directly imaged extrasolar giant planets. We are developing a new atmospheric retrieval methodology to help…
Asteroids (162173) Ryugu and (101955) Bennu observed by Hayabusa2 and OSIRIS-REx share many properties, but spectral observations by the telescopic Optical Navigation Camera (ONC-T) and MapCam detected subtle but significant differences,…
Accurate astrometry is crucial for determining orbits of near-Earth-asteroids (NEAs) and therefore better tracking them. This paper reports on a demonstration of 10 milliarcsecond-level astrometric precision on a dozen NEAs using the Pomona…
Active debris removal techniques are posed to become an important tool in maintaining the safety of the near-Earth space environment. These techniques rely on a clear understanding of the rotational motion of the debris targets, which is…
The size-dependent effects of asteroids on surface regolith and collisional lifetimes suggest that small asteroids are younger than large asteroids. In this study, we performed multicolor main-belt asteroid (MBA) survey by Subaru…
In recent years, high-resolution transmission spectroscopy in the near-infrared has led to detections of prominent molecules in several giant exoplanets on close-in orbits. This approach has traditionally relied on the large Doppler shifts…
To gain a better understanding of the surfaces of planets and small bodies in the solar system, the flow behavior of granular material for various gravity levels is of utmost interest. We performed a set of reduced-gravity measurements to…
Today, the near-Earth space is facing a paradigm change as the number of new spacecraft is literally sky-rocketing. Increasing numbers of small satellites threaten the sustainable use of space, as without removal, space debris will…
We present a novel method for extracting moving objects from TESS data using machine learning. Our approach uses two stacked 3D U-Nets with skip connections, which we call a W-Net, to filter background and identify pixels containing moving…
We consider sampling and detection strategies for solar illuminated space debris. We argue that the lowest detectable debris cross section may be reduced by 10-100x by analysis of stacks of image frames collected at high rates rather than…
This paper introduces a novel, small form-factor, aerial vehicle research platform for agile object detection, classification, tracking, and interaction tasks. General-purpose hardware components were designed to augment a given aerial…