Related papers: Analytical framework for mutual approximations -- …
Orbital solutions for binary or multiple stellar systems that combine astrometry (e.g., position angles and angular separations) with spectroscopy (radial velocities) have important advantages over astrometric-only or spectroscopic-only…
The minimum orbital intersection distance is used as a measure to assess potential close approaches and collision risks between astronomical objects. Methods to calculate this quantity have been proposed in several previous publications.…
This paper presents the basic principle and theoretical relationships of an original method allowing to retrieve the Wavefront Errors (WFE) of a ground or space-borne telescope when combining its main pupil with a second, decentered…
Context: With no conclusive detection to date, the search for exomoons, satellites of planets orbiting other stars, remains a formidable challenge. Detecting these objects, compiling a population-level sample and constraining their…
This paper presents a unique approach to the problem of calculating revisit time metrics for different satellite orbits, sensor geometries, and constellation configurations with application to early lifecycle design and optimisation…
When reconstructing natural satellites' ephemerides from space missions' tracking data, the dynamics of the spacecraft and natural bodies are often solved for separately, in a decoupled manner. Alternatively, the ephemeris generation and…
The highest priority recommendation of the Astro2020 Decadal Survey for space-based astronomy was the construction of an observatory capable of characterizing habitable worlds. In this paper series we explore the detectability of and…
Modern lunar-planetary ephemerides are numerically integrated on the observational timespan of more than 100 years (with the last 20 years having very precise astrometrical data). On such long timespans, not only finite difference…
We carried out observations of the small jovian satellite Amalthea (J5) as it was being eclipsed by the Galilean satellites near the 2009 equinox of Jupiter in order to apply the technique of mutual event photometry to the astrometric…
An analytical formulation for collision avoidance maneuvers involving a spacecraft and a space debris is presented, including solutions for the maximum deviation and minimum collision probability cases. Gauss' planetary equations and…
Telescope and detector developments continuously enable deeper and more detailed studies of astronomical objects. Larger collecting areas, improvement in dispersion and detector techniques, and higher sensitivities allow detection of more…
Specially-designed microlensing searches, some of which have been underway for several years, are sensitive to extrasolar planets orbiting the most common stars in our Galaxy. Microlensing is particularly well-suited to the detection of…
The detectability of moons of extra-solar planets is investigated, focussing on the time-of-arrival perturbation technique, a method for detecting moons of pulsar planets, and the photometric transit timing technique, a method for detecting…
Aims: We compare the apparent difference in timing of transiting planets (or eclipsing binaries) that are observed from widely separated locations (parallactic delay). Methods: A simple geometrical argument allow us to show that the…
Accurate astrometry is crucial for determining orbits of near-Earth-asteroids (NEAs) and therefore better tracking them. This paper reports on a demonstration of 10 milliarcsecond-level astrometric precision on a dozen NEAs using the Pomona…
Following previous suggestions of other researchers, this paper discusses the prospects for astrometric observation of MACHO gravitational microlensing events. We derive the expected astrometric observables for a simple microlensing event…
This work applies a quantitative metric well-known to the data assimilation community to a new context in order to capture the relative representativeness of non-simultaneous or non-co-located observations and quantify how these…
Background. Relative astrometry at or below the micro-arcsec level with a 1m class space telescope has been repeatedly proposed as a tool for exo-planet detection and characterization, as well as for several topics at the forefront of…
The irregular satellites of the giant planets are believed to have been captured during the evolution of the solar system. Knowing their physical parameters, such as size, density, and albedo is important for constraining where they came…
This note is concerned with accurate and computationally efficient approximations of moments of Gaussian random variables passed through sigmoid or softmax mappings. These approximations are semi-analytical (i.e. they involve the numerical…