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A search for temporal changes on Pluto and Charon was motivated by (1) the discovery of young surfaces in the Pluto system that imply ongoing or recent geologic activity, (2) the detection of active plumes on Triton during the Voyager 2…
Using a large suite of n-body simulations, we explore the discovery space for new satellites in the Pluto-Charon system. For the adopted masses and orbits of the known satellites, there are few stable prograde or polar orbits with semimajor…
Jupiter Trojan asteroids are minor bodies that share Jupiter's orbit around the Sun. Although not yet well understood in origin and composition, they have surface properties that, besides being comparable with other populations of small…
The size distribution and total mass of objects in the Oort Cloud have important implications to the theory of planets formation, including the properties of, and the processes taking place in the early solar system. We discuss the…
The exploration of the Pluto-Charon system by the New Horizons spacecraft represents the first opportunity to understand the distribution of albedo and other photometric properties of the surfaces of objects in the Solar System's "Third…
NASA's Parker Solar Probe (Parker) spacecraft reached its first perihelion of 35.7 solar radii on November 5th, 2018. To aid in mission planning, and in anticipation of the unprecedented measurements to be returned, in late October, we…
We propose to use a modest fraction of the re-purposed Kepler mission time and apertures to greatly increase the quantity and quality of our knowledge of near-Earth asteroids (NEAs) rotation and shape. NEAs are important for understanding…
The Kepler mission opened the door to a small but bonafide sample of circumbinary planets. Some initial trends have been identified and used to challenge our theories of planet and binary formation. However, the Kepler sample is not only…
Since the last Pluto volatile transport models were published (Hansen and Paige 1996), we have (i) new stellar occultation data from 2002 and 2006-2012 that have roughly twice the pressure as the discovery occultation of 1988, (ii) new…
The most pristine remnants of the Solar system's planet formation epoch orbit the Sun beyond Neptune, the small bodies of the trans-Neptunian object populations. The bulk of the mass is in ~100 km objects, but objects at smaller sizes have…
The long-term evolution of the outer Solar System is subject to the influence of the giant planets, however, perturbations from other massive bodies located in the region imprint secular signatures, that are discernible in long-term…
Considering effects of tidal plus centrifugal stress acting on icy-rocks and the tensile strength thereof, icy-rocks being in the density range (1-2.4) g cm-3 which had come into existence as collisional ejecta (debris) in the vicinity of…
The Kuiper Belt is a distant region of the Solar System. On 1 January 2019, the New Horizons spacecraft flew close to (486958) 2014 MU69, a Cold Classical Kuiper Belt Object, a class of objects that have never been heated by the Sun and are…
We have analyzed the first 3.75 years of data from TAOS, the Taiwanese American Occultation Survey. TAOS monitors bright stars to search for occultations by Kuiper Belt Objects (KBOs). This dataset comprises 5e5 star-hours of…
Since the beginning of robotic interplanetary exploration nearly six decades ago, successful atmospheric entry has been accomplished at Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, and Titan. More entry probe missions are planned to Venus, Titan, and…
Kepler-22b is the first transiting planet to have been detected in the habitable-zone of its host star. At 2.4 Earth radii, Kepler-22b is too large to be considered an Earth-analog, but should the planet host a moon large enough to maintain…
The POEMMA-Balloon with Radio (PBR) is a proposed payload to fly on a NASA Super Pressure Balloon (SPB). It will act as a pathfinder of the Probe Of Extreme Multi-Messenger Astrophysics (POEMMA) detector. PBR will consist of an innovative…
Stellar occultations provide a powerful tool to explore objects of the outer solar system. The Gaia mission now provides milli-arcsec accuracy on the predictions of these events and makes possible observations that were previously…
Kepler Mission results are rapidly contributing to fundamentally new discoveries in both the exoplanet and asteroseismology fields. The data returned from Kepler are unique in terms of the number of stars observed, precision of photometry…
We present the results from four stellar occultations by (486958) Arrokoth, the flyby target of the New Horizons extended mission. Three of the four efforts led to positive detections of the body, and all constrained the presence of rings…