Related papers: ESA Science Programme Missions: Contributions and …

The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope is designed to provide an unprecedented optical imaging dataset that will support investigations of our Solar System, Galaxy and Universe, across half the sky and over ten years of repeated observation.…

The U.S. Virtual Astronomical Observatory (VAO) is a product-driven organization that provides new scientific research capabilities to the astronomical community. Software development for the VAO follows a lightweight framework that guides…

The Habitable Worlds Observatory (HWO) aims to image and characterize at least 25 ExoEarth candidates (EECs). Achieving this goal requires a detailed understanding of the observatory's design trade space, including the operational…

ELSA stands for the ambitious goal of `European Leadership in Space Astrometry'. In this closing contribution I will examine how the ELSA network has advanced this goal. I also look ahead to the time when the Gaia data will be published and…

The ESA Euclid mission is a space telescope that will survey ~15,000 square degrees of the sky, primarily to study the distant universe (constraining cosmological parameters through the lensing of galaxies). It is also expected to observe…

The present H.E.S.S. II era of the H.E.S.S. collaboration follows from the successful upgrade of the H.E.S.S. array, and the first published results obtained with this new instrument. Thanks to these achievements, a lower energy threshold…

A movement is underway to test the uniqueness of Earth. Sponsored primarily by NASA, it is enlisting talented researchers from many disciplines. It is conceiving new telescopes to discover and characterize other worlds like Earth around…

This paper on ASTROD I is based on our 2010 proposal submitted for the ESA call for class-M mission proposals, and is a sequel and an update to our previous paper [Experimental Astronomy 23 (2009) 491-527; designated as Paper I] which was…

Comet Interceptor is an ESA science mission with payload contributions from ESA Member States and with an international participation by JAXA. It is the first mission that is being designed, built, and potentially launched before its target…

Over the last few years, several interesting observations were obtained with the help of solar Adaptive Optics (AO). In this paper, few observations made using the solar AO are enlightened and briefly discussed. A list of disadvantages with…

The timing (cross-)calibration of astronomical instruments is often done by comparing pulsar times-of-arrival (TOAs) to a reference timing model. In high-energy astronomy, the choice of solar system ephemerides and source positions used to…

Mitigating risks posed by solar energetic particles (SEPs) to operations and exploration in space and Earth's atmosphere motivates the development of advanced, synergistic approaches for monitoring, modeling, and analyzing space weather…

The Herschel Common Science System (HCSS) (Ott et al. 2006) (Ott & Science Ground Segment Consortium 2010) is a substantial Java software package, accompanying the development of the Herschel Mission (Pilbratt et al. 2010), supporting all…

In the last few years, new Adaptive Optics [AO] techniques have emerged to answer new astronomical challenges: Ground-Layer AO [GLAO] and Multi-Conjugate AO [MCAO] to access a wider Field of View [FoV], Multi-Object AO [MOAO] for the…

ESA's Gaia space astrometry mission is performing an all-sky survey of stellar objects. At the beginning of the nominal mission in July 2014, an operation scheme was adopted that enabled Gaia to routinely acquire observations of all stars…

The EAGLE instrument is a Multi-Object Adaptive Optics (MOAO) fed, multiple Integral Field Spectrograph (IFS), working in the Near Infra-Red (NIR), on the European Extremely Large Telescope (E-ELT). A Phase A design study was delivered to…

Adaptive Optics at mid-IR wavelengths has long been seen as either not necessary or easy. The impact of atmospheric turbulence on the performance of 8-10 meter class telescopes in the mid-IR is relatively small compared to other performance…

To investigate the feasibility of ancillary target observations with ESA's Ariel mission, we compiled a list of potentially interesting young stars: FUors, systems harbouring extreme debris discs and a larger sample of young stellar objects…

The U.S. Virtual Astronomical Observatory (VAO; http://www.us-vao.org/) has been in operation since May 2010. Its goal is to enable new science through efficient integration of distributed multi-wavelength data. This paper describes the…

Users of astronomical observatories rely on Exposure Time Calculators (ETC) to prepare their proposals and then their observations. The ETC is therefore a crucial element in an observatory's data workflow and in particular is key to…