Related papers: Overcoming Inverse-square Law of Gravitation and L…
Lightsails are a highly promising spacecraft concept that has attracted interest in recent years due to its potential to travel at near-relativistic speeds. Such speeds, which current conventional crafts cannot reach, offer tantalizing…
Advanced civilizations capable of interstellar travel, if they exist, are likely to have advanced propulsion methods. Spaceships moving at high speeds would leave a particular signature which could be detected from Earth. We propose a…
The Breakthrough Starshot project aims to send centimeter-sized, gram-scale "StarChip" probes to Alpha Centauri at a speed of $\sim0.2c$. On the other hand, Zhang \& Li recently proposed that trans-relativistic cameras may be sent to any…
The exploration of interstellar space will require autonomous navigation systems that do not rely on tracking from the Earth. Here I develop a method to determine the 3D position and 3D velocity of a spacecraft in deep space using a star…
One proposed method for spacecraft to reach nearby stars is by accelerating sails using either solar radiation pressure or directed energy. This idea constitutes the thesis behind the Breakthrough Starshot project, which aims to accelerate…
Data rates in an interstellar communication network suffer from the inverse square law due to the vast distances between the stars. To achieve high (Gbits/s) data rates, some combination of large apertures and high power is required.…
New means of interstellar travel are now being considered by various research teams, assuming lightweight spaceships to be accelerated via either laser or solar radiation to a significant fraction of the speed of light (c). We recently…
Context. We present a model-free method for mapping surface brightness variations. Aims. We aim to develop a method that is not dependent on either stellar atmosphere models or limb-darkening equation. This method is optimized for exoplanet…
Spacecraft relative motion planning is concerned with the design and execution of maneuvers relative to a nominal target. These types of maneuvers are frequently utilized in missions such as rendezvous and docking, satellite inspection and…
This paper investigates an autonomous navigation method for spacecraft operating in the outer solar system, up to 250 AU from the Sun, using the parallactic shifts of nearby stars. These measurements enable estimation of the spacecraft…
Lightsails are promising spacecraft that can traverse interstellar distances within decades via radiation-pressure propulsion from high-power lasers. The envisioned missions crucially rely on the sail being confined within the propelling…
This paper introduces two innovative convex optimization formulations to simultaneously optimize the H2/Hinf observer gain and sensing precision, and guarantee a specified estimation error bound for nonlinear systems in LPV form. Applied to…
Super resolution is an essential tool in optics, especially on interstellar scales, due to physical laws restricting possible imaging resolution. We propose using optimal transport and entropy for super resolution applications. We prove…
We derive solutions to transit light curves of exoplanets orbiting rapidly-rotating stars. These stars exhibit significant oblateness and gravity darkening, a phenomenon where the poles of the star have a higher temperature and luminosity…
Lightsails are a promising spacecraft concept that can reach relativistic speeds via propulsion by laser light, allowing travel to nearby stars within a human lifetime. The success of a lightsail mission requires that any motion in the…
In present work the author presents a new set of spacetime measures for both, subluminal and superluminal motion regimes, which do not diverge for the speed of light in the former case and each regime has its own light-like cone which…
We reformulate the transport equation which determines the size, shape and orientation of infinitesimal light beams in arbitrary spacetimes. The behaviour of such light beams near vertices and conjugate points is investigated, with special…
How important are gravitational and relativistic effects for interstellar travel? We consider this question in the context of proposed laser-propelled spacecraft missions to neighboring stellar destinations. Our analysis applies to any…
We consider the effects of mutual transits by extrasolar planet-companion systems (in a true binary or a planet-satellite system) on light curves. We show that induced changes in light curves depend strongly on a ratio between a…
Photometric light curves suffer from fundamental degeneracies that limit surface information recovery. We demonstrate that astrometry enables access to complementary information through photocentre variations induced by rotating surface…