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Are we alone? It is a compelling question that human beings have confronted for centuries. The search for extraterrestrial life is a broad range of quests for finding simple forms of life up to intelligent beings in the Universe. The…
Small-satellites and CubeSats offer a low-cost pathway to access Low Earth Orbit at altitudes of 450 km and lower thanks to miniaturization and advancement in reliability of commercial electronics. However, at these low altitudes,…
The recent explosive growth of small satellite operations driven primarily from an academic or pedagogical need, has demonstrated the viability of commercial-off-the-shelf technologies in space. They have also leveraged and shown the need…
IRAC excels at detecting distant objects. Due to a combination of the shapes of the spectral energy distributions of galaxies and the low background achieved from space, IRAC reaches greater depth in comparable exposure time at 3.6 and 4.5…
In response to ESA Voyage 2050 announcement of opportunity, we propose an ambitious L-class mission to explore one of the most exciting bodies in the Solar System, Saturn largest moon Titan. Titan, a "world with two oceans", is an…
Despite recent major advances in robotics research, massive injections of capital into robotics startups, and significant market appetite for robotic solutions, large-scale real-world deployments of robotic systems remain relatively scarce…
New development approaches, including launch vehicles and advances in sensors, computing, and software, have lowered the cost of entry into space, and have enabled a revolution in low-cost, high-risk Small Satellite (SmallSat) missions. To…
Exoplanetary science has reached a historic moment. The James Webb Space Telescope will be capable of probing the atmospheres of rocky planets, and perhaps even search for biologically produced gases. However this is contingent on…
Icy moons with subsurface oceans of liquid water rank among the most promising astrobiological targets in our Solar System. In this work, we assess the feasibility of deploying laser sail technology in precursor life-detection missions. We…
Future missions to Mars and Venus will make use of aerobraking and aerocapture in order to gain mass through the saving of fuel at planetary arrival. So far only aerobraking has been demonstrated, if the Mars Premier project has paved the…
In a post-ChatGPT world, this paper explores the potential of leveraging scalable artificial intelligence for scientific discovery. We propose that scaling up artificial intelligence on high-performance computing platforms is essential to…
This roadmap outlines research pathways to determine whether Mars could be warmed with non-biological methods. It does not presuppose that warming Mars is desirable; its purpose is to identify what would need to be true for Mars to be…
Present and future space missions rely on systems of increasingly demanding performance for being successful. Drag-free technology is one of the technologies that is fundamental for LISA-Pathfinder, an ESA mission whose launch is planned…
High-energy neutrinos are uniquely suited to study a large variety of physics as they traverse the universe almost untouched, in contrast to conventional astronomical messengers like photons or cosmic rays which are limited by interactions…
The mission concept, Cosmic Origins Through UV Surveys (CETUS) is an all-UV space mission concept that was selected and funded by NASA for study in 2017. The main capabilities of CETUS that even Hubble doesn't have are: (1) wide-field…
Having discovered that Earth-sized planets are common, we are now embarking on a journey to determine if Earth-like planets are also common. Finding Earth-like planets is one of the most compelling endeavors of the 21st century - leading us…
Comets likely formed in the outer regions of the protosolar nebula where they incorporated and preserved primitive presolar materials, volatiles resident in the outer disk, and more refractory materials from throughout the disk. The return…
The Solar System Odyssey mission uses modern-day high-precision experimental techniques to test the laws of fundamental physics which determine dynamics in the solar system. It could lead to major discoveries by using demonstrated…
The search for habitable planets like Earth around other stars fulfils an ancient imperative to understand our origins and place in the cosmos. The past decade has seen the discovery of hundreds of planets, but nearly all are gas giants…
For more than 60 years, the predominant SETI search paradigm has entailed the observation of stars in an effort to detect alien electromagnetic signals that deliberately target Earth. However, this strategy is fraught with challenges when…