Related papers: Starling Formation-Flying Optical Experiment: Init…

We have developed a low-cost off-the-shelf component star sensor (StarSense) for use in minisatellites and CubeSats to determine the attitude of a satellite in orbit. StarSense is an imaging camera with a limiting magnitude of 6.5, which…

Starbugs are miniature piezoelectric 'walking' robots with the ability to simultaneously position many optical fibres across a telescope's focal plane. Their simple design incorporates two piezoceramic tubes to form a pair of concentric…

Wide-field rapid sky surveys serve as critical observational methods for time-domain astronomical research. The Antarctic region, with several months of continuous dark nights annually, is an ideal site for time-domain astronomical…

We propose AstroSLAM, a standalone vision-based solution for autonomous online navigation around an unknown target small celestial body. AstroSLAM is predicated on the formulation of the SLAM problem as an incrementally growing factor…

This paper develops a general observing strategy for missions performing all-sky surveys, where a single spacecraft maps the celestial sphere subject to realistic constraints. The strategy is flexible such that targeted observations and…

HERMES is a scientific mission composed of 3U nano-satellites dedicated to the detection and localization of high-energy astrophysical transients, with a distributed space architecture to form a constellation in Earth orbits. The space…

The use of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) is rapidly increasing in applications ranging from surveillance and first-aid missions to industrial automation involving cooperation with other machines or humans. To maximize area coverage and…

The Star Formation Across Cosmic Time (SFACT) survey is a new narrowband survey designed to detect emission-line galaxies (ELGs) and quasi-stellar objects (QSOs) over a wide range of redshifts in discrete redshift windows. The survey…

The Virtual Telescope for X-Ray Observations (VTXO) is an Astrophysics SmallSat mission being developed to demonstrate 10-milliarcsecond X-ray imaging using a Phase Fresnel Lense (PFL) based space telescope. PFLs promise to provide several…

The Chasing All Transients Constellation Hunters (CATCH) space mission is an intelligent constellation consisting of 126 micro-satellites in three types (A, B, and C), designed for X-ray observation with the objective of studying the…

This is the first paper of a series that will present data and scientific results from the WINGS project, a wide-field, multiwavelength imaging and spectroscopic survey of galaxies in 77 nearby clusters. The sample was extracted from the…

This paper investigates an autonomous navigation method for spacecraft operating in the outer solar system, up to 250 AU from the Sun, using the parallactic shifts of nearby stars. These measurements enable estimation of the spacecraft…

The microlensing parallax campaign with the $Spitzer$ space telescope aims to measure masses and distances of microlensing events seen towards the Galactic bulge, with a focus on planetary microlensing events. The hope is to measure how the…

The timing-based localization, which utilize the triangulation principle with the different arrival time of gamma-ray photons, with a fleet of Cubesats is a unique and powerful solution for the future all-sky gamma-ray observation, which is…

The Chasing All Transients Constellation Hunters (CATCH) space mission is focused on exploring the dynamic universe via X-ray follow-up observations of various transients. The first pathfinder of the CATCH mission, CATCH-1, was launched on…

In time-domain astronomy, a substantial number of transients will be discovered by multi-wavelength and multi-messenger observatories, posing a great challenge for follow-up capabilities. We have thus proposed an intelligent X-ray…

The idea behind FIRST (Fibered Imager foR a Single Telescope) is to use single-mode fibers to combine multiple apertures in a pupil plane as such as to synthesize a bigger aperture. The advantages with respect to a pure imager are i)…

Starbugs are miniaturised robotic devices that position optical fibres over a telescope's focal plane in parallel operation for high multiplex spectroscopic surveys. The key advantage of the Starbug positioning system is its potential to…

The climate crisis we are facing calls for significant improvements in our understanding of natural phenomena, with clouds being identified as a dominant source of uncertainty. To this end, the emerging field of 3D computed cloud tomography…

Formation-flying studies to date have required continuous and minute corrections of the orbital elements and attitudes of the spacecraft.This increases the complexity, and associated risk, of controlling the formation, which often makes…