Related papers: Uranus Study Report: KISS
The Hesperos mission proposed in this paper is a mission to Venus to investigate the interior structure and the current level of activity. The main questions to be answered with this mission are whether Venus has an internal structure and…
Modeling the interior of a planet is difficult because the small number of measured parameters is insufficient to constrain the many variables involved in describing the interior structure and composition. One solution is to invoke…
Minor bodies trapped in 1:1 co-orbital resonances with a host planet could be relevant to explain the origin of captured satellites. Among the giant planets, Uranus has one of the smallest known populations of co-orbitals, three objects,…
The outer giant planets, Uranus and Neptune, pose a challenge to theories of planet formation. They exist in a region of the Solar System where long dynamical timescales and a low primordial density of material would have conspired to make…
The ordering of the neutrino masses is a crucial input for a deep understanding of flavor physics, and its determination may provide the key to establish the relationship among the lepton masses and mixings and their analogous properties in…
K2-19b and c were among the first planets discovered by NASA's K2 mission and together stand in stark contrast with the physical and orbital properties of the solar system planets. The planets are between the size of Uranus and Saturn at…
Over the past three decades, exoplanet research has delivered an extensive census of planets spanning a wide range of masses, sizes, and orbital configurations. Despite this progress, the physical interpretation of these populations remains…
Mid-infrared spectral observations Uranus acquired with the Infrared Spectrometer (IRS) on the Spitzer Space Telescope are used to determine the abundances of C2H2, C2H6, CH3C2H, C4H2, CO2, and tentatively CH3 on Uranus at the time of the…
Why are the terrestrial planets so different? Venus should be the most Earth-like of all our planetary neighbours. Its size, bulk composition and distance from the Sun are very similar to those of the Earth. Its original atmosphere was…
Uranus' startlingly large obliquity of 98 degrees has yet to admit a satisfactory explanation. The most widely accepted hypothesis involving a giant impactor that tipped Uranus onto its side encounters several difficulties with regards to…
Significant advances in the discovery and characterization of the planetary systems of nearby stars can be accomplished with a moderate aperture high performance coronagraphic space mission that could be started in the next decade. Its…
Static structure models, which map mass-radius constraints to bulk planet composition, are frequently used to categorise exoplanets due to their computational efficiency and the high-level insight they offer into planetary properties.…
The exploration of carbon-to-oxygen ratios has yielded intriguing insights into the composition of close-in giant exoplanets, giving rise to a distinct classification: carbon-rich planets, characterized by a carbon-to-oxygen ratio $\ge$ 1…
The current goals of the astrobiology community are focused on developing a framework for the detection of biosignatures, or evidence thereof, on objects inside and outside of our solar system. A fundamental aspect of understanding the…
The zeta ring is the innermost component of the Uranian ring system. It is of scientific interest because its morphology changed significantly between the Voyager 2 encounter in 1986 and subsequent Earth-based observations around 2007. It…
The U.S. astronomy decadal surveys have been models for advice to government on how to apportion resources to optimise the scientific return on national investments in facilities and manpower. The U.S. is now gearing up to conduct its 2020…
Most our knowledge about rocky exoplanets is based on their measure of mass and radius. These two parameters are routinely measured and are used to categorise different populations of observed exoplanets. They are also tightly linked to the…
With thousands of exoplanets now identified, the characterization of habitable planets and the potential identification of inhabited ones is a major challenge for the coming decades. We review the current working definition of habitable…
The current standard model of cosmology successfully describes a variety of measurements, but the nature of its main ingredients, dark matter and dark energy, remains unknown. Euclid is a medium-class mission in the Cosmic Vision 2015-2025…
The Hot Universe Baryon Surveyor (HUBS) mission is proposed to study "missing" baryons in the universe. Unlike dark matter, baryonic matter is made of elements in the periodic table, and can be directly observed through the electromagnetic…