Related papers: Laboratory characterisation bench for high precisi…
The architecture of exoplanetary systems is relatively well known inward to 1 AU thanks to indirect techniques, which have allowed characterization of thousands of exoplanet orbits, masses and sometimes radii. The next step is the…
The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) will search for planets transiting bright stars with Ic<13. TESS has been selected by NASA for launch in 2018 as an Astrophysics Explorer mission, and is expected to discover a thousand or…
Precision astrometry at microarcsecond accuracy has application to a wide range of astrophysical problems. This paper is a study of the science questions that can be addressed using an instrument that delivers parallaxes at about 4…
Direct detection is a very promising field in exoplanet science. It allows the detection of companions with large separation and allows their spectral analysis. A few planets have already been detected and are under spectral analysis. But…
We present the result from a comprehensive laboratory and on-sky characterization of the commercial spectrograph system consisting of a PIXIS 1300BX charge-coupled device (CCD) camera and an IsoPlane 320A spectrograph as part of the…
For operation at the High Luminosity Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the ATLAS experiment is building a new all-silicon inner tracker (ITk). The production and testing of thousands of silicon pixel and strip modules is required to cover the…
The detection and characterisation of extra-solar planets is a major theme driving modern astronomy, with the vast majority of such measurements being achieved by Doppler radial-velocity and transit observations. Another technique -- direct…
Time-series photometry taken from ground-based facilities is improved with the use of comparison stars due to the short timescales of atmospheric-induced variability. However, the sky is bright in the thermal infrared (3-5 um), and the…
Hyperspectral imaging is a powerful tool for Earth exploration, allowing for detailed analysis of spectral features. India has launched a dedicated hyperspectral Earth observation satellite capable of capturing data across a wide…
Background. Astrometry at or below the micro-arcsec level with an imaging telescope assumes that the uncertainty on the location of an unresolved source can be an arbitrarily small fraction of the detector pixel, given a sufficient photon…
State-of-the-art coronagraphs employed on extreme adaptive optics enabled instruments, are constantly improving the contrast detection limit for companions at ever closer separations to the host star. In order to constrain their properties…
High precision astrometry aims at source position determination to a very small fraction of the diffraction image size, in high SNR regime. One of the key limitations to such goal is the optical response variation of the telescope over a…
Astrometry plays a crucial role in understanding the structure, dynamics, and evolution of celestial objects by providing precise measurements of their positions and motions. We propose a new approach to wide-field, relative astrometry,…
The accumulation of aberrations along the optical path in a telescope produces distortions and speckles in the resulting images, limiting the performance of cameras at high angular resolution. It is important to achieve the highest possible…
We investigate the limits of ground-based astrometry with adaptive optics using the core of the Galactic globular cluster M5. Adaptive optics systems provide near diffraction-limit imaging with the world's largest telescopes. The…
The scientific interest in directly image and identifying Earth-like planets within the Habitable Zone (HZ) around nearby stars is driving the design of specialized direct imaging mission such as ACESAT, EXO-C, EXO-S and AFTA-C. The inner…
Context: Massive amounts of spectroscopic data obtained by stellar surveys are feeding an ongoing revolution in our knowledge of stellar and Galactic astrophysics. Analysing these data sets to extract the best possible astrophysical…
With the aim of paving the road for future accurate astrometry with MICADO at the European-ELT, we performed an astrometric study using two different but complementary approaches to investigate two critical components that contribute to the…
The Laser Ranging Interferometer onboard the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment Follow-On mission proved the feasibility of an interferometric sensor for inter-satellite length tracking with sub-nanometer precision, establishing an…
We characterize the astrometric distortion at the edges of thick, fully-depleted CCDs in the lab using a bench-top simulation of LSST observing. By illuminating an array of forty thousand pinholes (30mu m diameter) at the object plane of a…