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The detection and characterization of Earth-like planet is approaching rapidly thanks to radial velocity surveys (HARPS), transit searches (Corot, Kepler) and space observatories dedicated to their characterization are already in…
The Universe is almost totally unexplored at low surface brightness levels. In spite of great progress in the construction of large telescopes and improvements in the sensitivity of detectors, the limiting surface brightness of imaging…
The goals of the astrobiology community are focussed on developing a framework for the detection of biosignatures, or evidence thereof, on objects inside and outside of our solar system. A fundamental aspect of understanding the limits of…
Exoplanetary science is on the verge of an unprecedented revolution. The thousands of exoplanets discovered over the past decade have most recently been supplemented by discoveries of potentially habitable planets around nearby low-mass…
Little is known about the radio astronomical universe at frequencies below 10 MHz because such radiation does not penetrate the ionosphere. A cubesat-based observatory for the 1--10 MHz band could be rapidly and economically deployed in low…
Exploration of terrestrial planets such as Mars are conducted using orbiters, landers and rovers. Cameras and instruments onboard orbiters have enabled global mapping of Mars at low spatial resolution. Landers and rovers such as the Mars…
Robots can be used to collect environmental data in regions that are difficult for humans to traverse. However, limitations remain in the size of region that a robot can directly observe per unit time. We introduce a method for selecting a…
Super-resolution imaging using sub-diffraction field localization by micron sized transparent beads (microspheres) was recently demonstrated [1]. Practical applications in microscopy require control over the positioning of the microspheres.…
Microlensing is one of the most powerful methods that can detect extrasolar planets and a future space-based survey with a high monitoring frequency is proposed to detect a large sample of Earth-mass planets. In this paper, we examine the…
One of the big challenges in exoplanet science is to determine the atmospheric makeup of extrasolar planets, and to find biosignatures that hint at the existence of biochemical processes on another world. The biomarkers we are trying to…
Atmospheric refraction affects to various degrees exoplanet transit, lunar eclipse, as well as stellar occultation observations. Exoplanet retrieval algorithms often use analytical expressions for the column abundance along a ray traversing…
Information transmission via communication between agents is ubiquitous on Earth, and is a vital facet of living systems. In this paper, we aim to quantify this rate of information transmission associated with Earth's biosphere and…
Studying lunar dust is vital to the exploration of the Moon and other airless planetary bodies. The Ultraviolet and Visible Spectrometer (UVS) on board the Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer (LADEE) spacecraft conducted a series…
We demonstrate that the global fields of temperature, humidity and geopotential heights admit a nearly sparse representation in the wavelet domain, offering a viable path forward to explore new paradigms of sparsity-promoting data…
The detection of phosphine in the atmosphere of Venus at an abundance of $\sim 20$ ppb suggests that this gas is being generated by either indeterminate abiotic pathways or biological processes. We consider the latter possibility, and…
The search for atmospheric biosignatures in Earth-like exoplanets is one of the most pressing challenges in observational astrobiology. Detecting biogenic gases in terrestrial planets requires high-resolution observations and long…
The search for life on extrasolar planets is based on the assumption that one can screen extrasolar planets for habitability spectroscopically. The first space born instruments able to detect as well as characterize extrasolar planets,…
Terrestrial planetary systems may exist around nearby stars as the Earth-sized counterparts to the many giant planets already discovered within the solar neighborhood. In this chapter we first discuss the numerous techniques which have been…
Capturing biological specimens at large scales with sub-micron resolution is crucial for biomedical research, but conventional cameras often can't handle the pixel requirements. While most microscopes use motorized stages to move samples…
Venus' atmosphere -- specifically its clouds buoyed up 40 to 60 km above the surface -- has long been suspected to encompass a biosphere where Earth-like living organisms could grow and flourish. This idea has been recently rekindled by the…