Related papers: Precautionary Planetary Defence
Constraints such as separation-of-duty are widely used to specify requirements that supplement basic authorization policies. However, the existence of constraints (and authorization policies) may mean that a user is unable to fulfill…
As asteroid mining moves toward reality, the high bar to entering the business may limit participation and increase inequality, reducing or eliminating any benefit gained by marginalized people or developing nations. Consideration of…
A set of 50,000 artificial Earth impacting asteroids was used to obtain, for the first time, information about the dominance of individual impact effects such as wind blast, overpressure shock, thermal radiation, cratering, seismic shaking,…
As AI systems become more advanced, companies and regulators will make difficult decisions about whether it is safe to train and deploy them. To prepare for these decisions, we investigate how developers could make a 'safety case,' which is…
Terrestrial exoplanets are on the verge of joining the ranks of astronomically accessible objects. Interpreting their observable characteristics, and informing decisions on instrument design and use, will hinge on the ability to model these…
Planets in extrasolar systems tend to interact such that their orbits lie near a boundary between apsidal libration and circulation, a "separatrix", with one eccentricity periodically reaching near-zero. One explanation, applied to the…
A hard difficulty in Astrobiology is the precise definition of what life is. All living beings have a cellular structure, so it is not possible to have a broader concept of life hence the search for extraterrestrial life is restricted to…
Recent studies of optimization methods and GNC of spacecraft near small bodies focusing on descent, landing, rendezvous, etc., with key safety constraints such as line-of-sight conic zones and soft landings have shown promising results;…
Balancing safety and efficiency when planning in crowded scenarios with uncertain dynamics is challenging where it is imperative to accomplish the robot's mission without incurring any safety violations. Typically, chance constraints are…
Existing evaluations of AI misuse safeguards provide a patchwork of evidence that is often difficult to connect to real-world decisions. To bridge this gap, we describe an end-to-end argument (a "safety case") that misuse safeguards reduce…
Tackling the many open questions in particle physics will require the construction of new colliders. This short note includes a few considerations that seem to be brought up rarely.
Do white dwarfs host asteroid systems? Although several lines of argument suggest that white dwarfs may be orbited by large populations of asteroids, transits would provide the most direct evidence. We demonstrate that the Kepler mission…
Deflection missions to near-Earth asteroids will encounter non-negligible uncertainties in the physical and orbital parameters of the target object. In order to reliably assess future impact threat mitigation operations such uncertainties…
The solving of scientific and practical application connected with conducting of satellite experiments and measurement demand analysis of geometric and physic conditions according to different kind of models. This is forced in connect of…
We present an approach to estimate an upper bound for the impact probability of a potentially hazardous asteroid when part of the force model depends on unknown parameters whose statistical distribution needs to be assumed. As case study we…
The increasing number and variety of extrasolar planets illustrates the importance of characterizing planetary perturbations. Planetary orbits are typically described by physically intuitive orbital elements. Here, we explicitly express the…
Our understanding of the processes that are relevant to the formation and maintenance of habitable planetary systems is advancing at a rapid pace, both from observation and theory. The present review focuses on recent research that bears on…
Transiting extrasolar planets provide an opportunity to study the mass-radius relation of planets as well as their internal structure. The existence of a secondary eclipse enables further study of the thermal properties of the the planet by…
Many exoplanets are discovered in binary star systems in internal or in circumbinary orbits. Whether the planet can be habitable or not depends on the possibility to maintain liquid water on its surface, and therefore on the luminosity of…
Current research on defending against adversarial examples focuses primarily on achieving robustness against a single attack type such as $\ell_2$ or $\ell_{\infty}$-bounded attacks. However, the space of possible perturbations is much…