Related papers: Astronomy from the Moon: From Exoplanets to Cosmol…
Motivated by efforts to return humanity to the Moon, three cases are reviewed for X-ray astronomy from the lunar surface: (1) Facilitation of ambitious engineering designs including high throughput telescopes, long focal length optics and…
The Moon is our future. It may seem like a chimera with a projected cost in excess of 100 billion\$, and counting, dispensed on ARTEMIS with little to show to date. However it is the ideal site for the largest telescopes that we can dream…
The next generation of space-based experiments will go hunting for answers to cosmology's key open questions which revolve around inflation, dark matter and dark energy. Low earth orbit and lunar missions within the European Space Agency's…
The lunar surface is a compelling location for large, distributed optical facilities, with significant advantages over orbital facilities for high spatial resolution astrophysics. The serious development of mission concepts is timely…
The lunar surface allows a unique way forward in cosmology, to go beyond current limits. The far side provides an unexcelled radio-quiet environment for probing the dark ages via 21 cm interferometry to seek elusive clues on the nature of…
We outline a concept for OWL-Moon, a 50-100m aperture telescope located on the surface of the Moon, to address three major areas in astronomy, namely the detection of biosignatures on habitable exoplanets, the geophysics of exoplanets, and…
Modern radio astrometry has reached the limit of the resolution that is determined by the size of the Earth. The only way to overcome that limit is to create the radio telescopes outside our planet. It is proposed to build an autonomous…
Space astronomy in the last 40 years has largely been done from spacecraft in low Earth orbit (LEO) for which the technology is proven and delivery mechanisms are readily available. However, new opportunities are arising with the surge in…
The number of small satellites has grown dramatically in the past decade from tens of satellites per year in the mid-2010s to a projection of tens of thousands in orbit by the mid-2020s. This presents both problems and opportunities for…
Current thinking about the Moon as a destination has revitalized interest in lunar astronomical observatories. Once seen by a large scientific community as a highly enabling site, the dramatic improvement in capabilities for free-space…
We address three major questions in astronomy, namely the detection of biosignatures on habitable exoplanets, the geophysics of exoplanets and cosmology. To achieve this goal, two requirements are needed. First a very large aperture to…
Astrophysical measurements away from the 1 AU orbit of Earth can enable several astrophysical science cases that are challenging or impossible to perform from Earthbound platforms, including: building a detailed understanding of the…
Two decades ago, astronomers began detecting planets orbiting stars other than our Sun, so-called exoplanets. Since that time, the rate of detections and the sensitivity to ever-smaller planets has improved dramatically with several…
The study of the Universe and all its contents, the physical phenomena and the evolution of the sky objects has always attracted the Humanity. The Astronomy begins to try to explain these things, others sciences too. Therefore, we think a…
The Moon is a unique platform for fundamental astrophysical measurements of gravitation, the Sun, and the Universe. Lacking a permanent ionosphere and, on the farside, shielded from terrestrial radio emissions, a radio telescope on the Moon…
Astronomy provides a laboratory for extreme physics, a window into environments at extremes of distance, temperature and density that often can't be reproduced in Earth laboratories, or at least not right away. A surprising amount of the…
Quantum optics potentially offers an information channel from the Universe beyond the established ones of imaging and spectroscopy. All existing cameras and all spectrometers measure aspects of the first-order spatial and/or temporal…
The lunar surface has historically been considered an optimal site for a broad range of astronomical telescopes. That assumption, which has come to be somewhat reflexive, is critically examined in this paper and found to be poorly…
A radio telescope placed in lunar orbit, or on the surface of the Moon's farside, could be of great value to the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI). The advantage of such a telescope is that it would be shielded by the body of…
Astrometry is a powerful technique to study the populations of extrasolar planets around nearby stars. It gives access to a unique parameter space and is therefore required for obtaining a comprehensive picture of the properties,…