Related papers: Precautionary Planetary Defence
Transits on single stars are rare. The probability rarely exceeds a few per cent. Furthermore, this probability rapidly approaches zero at increasing orbital period. Therefore transit surveys have been predominantly limited to the inner…
Machine learning is vulnerable to adversarial examples: inputs carefully modified to force misclassification. Designing defenses against such inputs remains largely an open problem. In this work, we revisit defensive distillation---which is…
Terrestrial planets are more likely to be detected if they orbit M dwarfs due to the favorable planet/star size and mass ratios. However, M dwarf habitable zones are significantly closer to the star than the one around our Sun, which leads…
Deflecting an asteroid from an Earth impact trajectory requires only small velocity changes, typically of the order of microns per second, if done many years ahead of time. For this, a highly precise method of determining the need,…
Theoretical studies in gravitational wave astronomy have mostly focused on the information that can be extracted from individual detections, such as the mass of a binary system and its location in space. Here we consider how the information…
Many observed giant planets lie on eccentric orbits. Such orbits could be the result of strong scatterings with other giant planets. The same dynamical instability that produces these scatterings may also cause habitable planets in interior…
This paper discusses the design and the performance achievable with active aerodynamic attitude control in very low Earth orbit, i.e. below 450 km in altitude. A novel real-time algorithm is proposed for selecting the angles of deflection…
Satellite imagery is now widely used in the defense sector for monitoring locations of interest. Although the increasing amount of data enables pattern identification and therefore prediction, carrying this task manually is hardly feasible.…
Asteroids are leftover pieces from the era of planet formation that help us understand conditions in the early Solar System. Unlike larger planetary bodies that were subject to global thermal modification during and subsequent to their…
Deep Neural Networks have been widely used in many fields. However, studies have shown that DNNs are easily attacked by adversarial examples, which have tiny perturbations and greatly mislead the correct judgment of DNNs. Furthermore, even…
The probability that an exoplanet transits its host star is high for planets in close orbits, but drops off rapidly for increasing semimajor axes. This makes transit surveys for planets with large semimajor axes orbiting bright stars…
Safe exploration presents a major challenge in reinforcement learning (RL): when active data collection requires deploying partially trained policies, we must ensure that these policies avoid catastrophically unsafe regions, while still…
Space infrastructures represent an emerging domain that is critical to the global economy and society. However, this domain is vulnerable to attacks, including cyber attacks and other kinds of attacks. To enhance the resilience of this…
Planets orbiting in the habitable zones of white dwarfs have recently been proposed as promising targets for biosignature searches. However, since the white dwarf habitable zone resides at 0.01 - 0.1 AU, planets residing there are subject…
With autonomous aerial vehicles enacting safety-critical missions, such as the Mars Science Laboratory Curiosity rover's landing on Mars, the tasks of automatically identifying and reasoning about potentially hazardous landing sites is…
To date, several exoplanets have been discovered orbiting stars with close binary companions (a~<30 AU). The fact that planets can form in these dynamically challenging environments implies that planet formation must be a robust process.…
This paper contributes to the nascent debate around safety cases for frontier AI systems. Safety cases are structured, defensible arguments that a system is acceptably safe to deploy in a given context. Historically, they have been used in…
Robots operating in close proximity to humans rely heavily on human trust to successfully complete their tasks. But what are the real outcomes when this trust is violated? Self-defense law provides a framework for analyzing tangible failure…
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…
With more than 4,300 confirmed exoplanets and counting, the next milestone in exoplanet research is to determine which of these newly found worlds could harbor life. Coronal Mass Ejections (CMEs), spawn by magnetically active,…