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A key challenge for starshades is formation flying. To successfully image exoplanets, the telescope boresight and starshade must be aligned to ~1 m at separations of tens of thousands of kilometers. This challenge has two parts: first, the…
State of the art methods in astronomical image reconstruction rely on the resolution of a regularized or constrained optimization problem. Solving this problem can be computationally intensive and usually leads to a quadratic or at least…
Starshade is one of the technologies that will enable the observation and characterization of small planets around nearby stars through direct imaging. The Starshade Exoplanetary Data Challenge (SEDC) was designed to validate…
On-orbit proximity operations in space rendezvous, docking and debris removal require precise and robust 6D pose estimation under a wide range of lighting conditions and against highly textured background, i.e., the Earth. This paper…
We propose a new method for solving an important problem of astronomy that arises in observations with ultrahigh-angular-resolution interferometers. This method is based on the application of the theory of artificial neural networks. We…
Starshades are a leading technology to enable the detection and spectroscopic characterization of Earth-like exoplanets. In this paper we report on optical experiments of sub-scale starshades that advance critical starlight suppression…
Accurate real-time pose estimation of spacecraft or object in space is a key capability necessary for on-orbit spacecraft servicing and assembly tasks. Pose estimation of objects in space is more challenging than for objects on Earth due to…
A star's luminosity increases as it evolves along the Main Sequence (MS), which inevitably results in a higher surface temperature for planets in orbit around the star. Technologically advanced civilizations may tackle this issue by…
In this study, we present a pragmatic lightweight pose estimation model. Our model can achieve real-time predictions using low-power embedded devices. This system was found to be very accurate and achieved a 94.5% accuracy of SOTA HRNet…
Quantifying the contribution of mergers to the stellar mass of galaxies is key for constraining the mechanisms of galaxy assembly across cosmic time. However, the mapping between observable galaxy properties and merger histories is not…
A starshade suppresses starlight by a factor of 1E11 in the image plane of a telescope, which is crucial for directly imaging Earth-like exoplanets. The state of the art in high contrast post-processing and signal detection methods were…
Spacecraft pose estimation is an essential computer vision application that can improve the autonomy of in-orbit operations. An ESA/Stanford competition brought out solutions that seem hardly compatible with the constraints imposed on…
Reliable relative pose estimation is a key enabler for autonomous rendezvous and proximity operations, yet space imagery is notoriously challenging due to extreme illumination, high contrast, and fast target motion. Event cameras provide…
Star trackers are one of the most accurate celestial sensors used for absolute attitude determination. The devices detect stars in captured images and accurately compute their projected centroids on an imaging focal plane with subpixel…
Accurately predicting eclipse events around irregular small bodies is crucial for spacecraft navigation, orbit determination, and spacecraft systems management. This paper introduces a novel approach leveraging neural implicit…
Most existing star-galaxy classifiers use the reduced summary information from catalogs, requiring careful feature extraction and selection. The latest advances in machine learning that use deep convolutional neural networks allow a machine…
This work introduces the Spacecraft Pose Network (SPN) for on-board estimation of the pose, i.e., the relative position and attitude, of a known non-cooperative spacecraft using monocular vision. In contrast to other state-of-the-art pose…
The detection of Earth-like exoplanets in the habitable zone of their stars, and their spectroscopic characterization in a search for biosignatures, requires starlight suppression that exceeds the current best ground-based performance by…
Pose estimation is a critical task in computer vision with a wide range of applications from activity monitoring to human-robot interaction. However,most of the existing methods are computationally expensive or have complex architecture.…
The accuracy of astrometric observations conducted via a space-borne optical interferometer orbiting the Earth is expected to approach a few microarcseconds. Data processing of such extremely high-precision measurements requires access to a…