Related papers: RAFTER: Ring Astrometric Field Telescope for Exo-p…
The Wide Field X-Ray Telescope (WFXT) is a medium-class mission designed to be 2-orders-of-magnitude more sensitive than any previous or planned X-ray mission for large area surveys and to match in sensitivity the next generation of…
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…
The design of the new space-based gamma-ray telescope GAMMA-400 is presented. GAMMA-400 is optimized for the energy 100 GeV with the best parameters: the angular resolution ~0.01 deg, the energy resolution ~1%, and the proton rejection…
To explore capabilities of moderate-size optical telescopes in surveys, the set of 9 new wide-field designs having apertures up to 1 m is considered. All but one systems have angular field of view in a range 3.5-10 degrees and flat focal…
Extraterrestrial gamma-ray astronomy is now a source of new knowledge in the fields of astrophysics, cosmic-ray physics, and the nature of dark matter. The next absolutely necessary step in the development of extraterrestrial high-energy…
This study presents a comprehensive system analysis for an instrument onboard the Habitable Worlds Observatory (HWO), designed for high-precision, high-accuracy differential astrometry, with the primary scientific goal to determine the mass…
A new physically based method to estimate hemispheric-directional reflectance factor (HDRF) from lightweight multispectral cameras that have a downwelling irradiance sensor is presented. It combines radiometry with photogrammetric computer…
A way to fully exploit the large collecting area of modern 8-10m class telescopes is high resolution spectroscopy. Many astrophysical problems from planetary science to cosmology benefit from spectroscopic observations at the highest…
The Five-hundred-metre Aperture Spherical Telescope (FAST) uses adaptive spherical panels to achieve a huge collecting area for radio waves. In this paper, we try to explore the optimal parameters for the curvature radius of spherical…
Radio wavelength astrometry of stars and other objects has a long and productive history. The use of that technique to determine whether stars have planets around them would cover a nearly unique part of the parameter space for detection of…
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…
I very briefly describe the latest generation near infrared (1-2.5 micron) instruments which are available on, or under development for `large' (D>=3.5 m) telescopes. Most of the imagers under construction are limited to relatively small…
In this paper we explore the maximum precision attainable in the location of a point source imaged by a pixel array detector in the presence of a background, as a function of the detector properties. For this we use a well-known result from…
Exoplanet detection and characterization through extreme adaptive optics (ExAO) is a key science goal of future extremely large telescopes. This achievement, however, will be limited in sensitivity by both quasi-static wavefront errors and…
WFIRST microlensing observations will return high-precision parallaxes, sigma(pi) < 0.3 microarcsec, for the roughly 1 million stars with H<14 in its 2.8 deg^2 field toward the Galactic bulge. Combined with its 40,000 epochs of high…
We explore the concept of liquid Argon time projection chamber (TPC) for gamma-ray astronomy in the 100 MeV --- 1 TeV energy range. We propose a basic layout for such a telescope called MAST. Using a last-generation rocket such as Falcon…
We report results of a recently-completed pre-Formulation Phase study of SPIRIT, a candidate NASA Origins Probe mission. SPIRIT is a spatial and spectral interferometer with an operating wavelength range 25 - 400 microns. SPIRIT will…
(Abridged) In this paper, we present a project of multi-channel wide-field optical sky monitoring system with high temporal resolution -- Small Aperture Imaging Network Telescope (SAINT) -- mostly built from off-the-shelf components and…
Instruments targeting 21~cm emission at high redshifts need a spectral dynamic range of better than ten thousand to distinguish the 21~cm background against bright foregrounds. Systematics arising from the antenna pattern are a leading…
The mission of NASA's Terrestrial Planet Finder (TPF) is to find Earth-like planets orbiting other stars and characterize the atmospheres of these planets using spectroscopy. Because of the enormous brightness ratio between the star and the…