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A coming resurgence of super heavy-lift launch vehicles has precipitated an immense interest in the future of crewed spaceflight and even future colonisation efforts. While it is true that a bright future awaits this sector, driven by…
The Lunar landing has drawn great interest in lunar exploration in recent years, and autonomous lunar landing navigation is fundamental to this task. AI is expected to play a critical role in autonomous and intelligent space missions, yet…
In Papers II and III we show that Transient Lunar Phenomena (TLPs) are likely related to lunar outgassing, albeit in ways not fully understood. Here we propose a path forward, in which current and forthcoming technologies provide a more…
The StarLight program conceptualizes fast interstellar travel via small wafer satellites (wafersats) that are propelled by directed energy. This process is wildly different from traditional space travel and trades large and slow spacecraft…
We introduce a new real-time pipeline for Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) and Visual Inertial Odometry (VIO) in the context of planetary rovers. We leverage prior information of the location of the lander to propose an…
We discuss work by the eSTAR project which demonstrates a fully closed loop autonomous system for the follow up of possible micro-lensing anomalies. Not only are the initial micro-lensing detections followed up in real time, but ongoing…
Discovered in October 2017, the interstellar object designated 1I/'Oumuamua was the first such object to be observed travelling through our solar system. 1I/'Oumuamua has other characteristics never seen before in a celestial body and…
The employment of a large area Phase Fresnel Lens (PFL) in a gamma-ray telescope offers the potential to image astrophysical phenomena with micro-arcsecond angular resolution. In order to assess the feasibility of this concept, two detailed…
[Abridged] The Moon is a unique platform from and on which to conduct astrophysical measurements. The Lunar University Network for Astrophysics Research (LUNAR) and the Center for Lunar Origins and Evolution (CLOE) teams within the NASA…
LOFT is one of the four medium mission candidates (M3), selected by ESA in the framework of the Cosmic Vision Programme (2015-2025), for feasibility study. If approved by ESA in 2014, its launch is foreseen in 2022-2024. LOFT is being…
The TUS detector was the first space-based mission aimed for ultra-high-energy cosmic ray (UHECR) measurements. The detector was designed to register the fluorescent signal of extensive air showers (EAS) developing in the night atmosphere…
The Lunar Orbital Platform-Gateway (LOP-Gateway, or simply Gateway) is a crewed platform that will be assembled and operated in the vicinity of the Moon by NASA and international partner organizations, including ESA, starting from the…
LOFT, the large observatory for X-ray timing, is a new mission concept competing with other four candidates for a launch opportunity in 2022-2024. LOFT will be performing high-time resolution X-ray observations of compact objects, combining…
We present a technique for verifying or refuting exoplanet candidates from the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) mission by searching for nearby eclipsing binary stars using higher-resolution archival images from ground-based…
A Low Earth orbit (LEO) satellite constellation consists of a large number of small satellites traveling in space with high mobility and collecting vast amounts of mobility data such as cloud movement for weather forecast, large herds of…
The Large Observatory For x-ray Timing (LOFT) was studied within ESA M3 Cosmic Vision framework and participated in the final down-selection for a launch slot in 2022-2024. Thanks to the unprecedented combination of effective area and…
Chang'E 4 is the first mission to the far side of the Moon and consists of a lander, a rover, and a relay spacecraft. Lander and rover were launched at 18:23 UTC on December 7, 2018 and landed in the von K\'arm\'an crater at 02:26 UTC on…
Microlensing experiments today have a tantalizing result; they have detected an excess of microlensing events beyond what is expected from known stellar populations. These events could be due to a possible form of Halo dark matter. However,…
PLAnetary Transits and Oscillations of stars (PLATO) is an ESA M-class mission to be launched by the end of 2026 to discover and characterize transiting planets around bright and nearby stars, and in particular habitable rocky planets…
We conducted a project of reinvestigating the 2017--2019 microlensing data collected by the high-cadence surveys with the aim of finding planets that were missed due to the deviations of planetary signals from the typical form of short-term…