Related papers: Reaching sub-millisecond accuracy in stellar occul…
We present an approach that significantly increases the sensitivity for finding and tracking small and fast near Earth asteroids (NEA's). This approach relies on a combined use of a new generation of high-speed cameras which allow short,…
Optical timing with rapid, seconds-to-minutes cadences with high photometric precision and gap-free long baselines is necessary for an unambiguous physical picture of accretion phenomena, and is only possible from space. Exoplanet-hunting…
Serendipitous stellar occultation search is so far the only way to detect the existence of very small, very dim, remote objects in the solar system. To date, however, there are only very few reported detections for trans-Neptunian objects…
Lens time delays are a powerful probe of cosmology, provided that the gravitational potential of the main deflector can be modeled with sufficient precision. Recent work has shown that this can be achieved by detailed modeling of the host…
Thanks to the Rossi X-ray Timing Explorer (RXTE), it is now widely recognized that fast X-ray timing can be used to probe strong gravity fields around collapsed objects and constrain the equation of state of dense matter in neutron stars.…
Fast X-ray timing can be used to probe strong gravity fields around collapsed objects and constrain the equation of state of dense matter in neutron stars. These studies require extremely good photon statistics. In view of the huge…
We have developed two redundant daytime star cameras to provide the fine pointing solution for the balloon-borne submillimeter telescope, BLAST. The cameras are capable of providing a reconstructed pointing solution with an absolute…
Microarcsecond (uas) astrometry is an indispensable technique to detect earth-like exoplanets, fully characterize exoplanetary orbits, and measure their masses --information critical for assessing their habitability. Highly accurate…
Satellite quantum communications have rapidly evolved in the past few years, culminating in the proposal, development, and deployment of satellite missions dedicated to quantum key distribution and the realization of fundamental tests of…
The Near Earth Object Surveillance Satellite (NEOSSat) is a Canadian-led 15 cm Earth-orbiting telescope originally designed to detect asteroids near the Sun. Its design is however also suitable for the observation of exoplanetary transits…
Some optical measurements require relative timing of intensity variations with accuracy much finer than the camera frame period. One motivating example is dynamic aurora, where different prompt emissions are expected to originate from…
We explore the potential of an array of O(100) small fixed telescopes, aligned along a meridian and automated to measure millions of occultations of Gaia stars by minor planets, to constrain gravitational signatures from a "Planet X" mass…
The serendipitous detection of stellar occultations by Outer Solar System objects is a powerful method for ascertaining the small end ($r \lesssim 15$ km) of the size distribution of Kuiper Belt Objects and may potentially allow the…
The stellar occultation technique provides competitive accuracy in determining the sizes, shapes, astrometry, etc., of the occulting body, comparable to in-situ observations by spacecraft. With the increase in the number of known Solar…
The Earth's atmospheric turbulence degrades the precision of ground-based astrometry. Here, we discuss these limitations and propose that, with proper treatment of systematics and by leveraging the many epochs available from the Korean…
The Enhanced X-ray Timing and Polarimetry (eXTP) mission is a space mission to be launched in the late 2020s that is currently in development led by China in international collaboration with European partners. Here we provide a progress…
While Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) covers a considerable area of the sky during routine observations and the pointing schedule is easy to follow, it is not obvious to retrieve the current and/or predicted visibility of a…
Fast timing capability in X-ray observation of astrophysical objects is one of the key properties for the ASTRO-H (Hitomi) mission. Absolute timing accuracies of 350 micro second or 35 micro second are required to achieve nominal scientific…
The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) is NASA's latest space telescope dedicated to the discovery of transiting exoplanets around nearby stars. Besides the main goal of the mission, asteroseismology is an important secondary goal…
Kuiper belt objects smaller than a few kilometers are difficult to observe directly. They can be detected when they randomly occult a background star. Close to the ecliptic plane, each star is occulted once every tens of thousands of hours,…