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The origin of the Uranian satellite system remains uncertain. The four major satellites have nearly circular, co-planar orbits and the ratio of the satellite system and planetary mass resembles Jupiter's satellite system, suggesting the…
Future missions to Enceladus would benefit from multi-moon tours that leverage V-infinity on resonant orbits to progressively transfer between moons. Such "resonance family hopping" trajectories present a vast search space for global…
Solar system exploration provides numerous possibilities for advancing technosignature science. The search for life in the solar system includes missions designed to search for evidence of biosignatures on other planetary bodies, but many…
Earth's magnetosphere is vital for today's technologically dependent society. To date, numerous design studies have been conducted and over a dozen science missions have own to study the magnetosphere. However, a majority of these solutions…
Many science missions require an unobstructed view of space and a stable thermal environment but lack the technical or programmatic resources to reach orbits that satisfy these needs. This paper presents a high Earth orbit in 2:1 resonance…
The discovery of planetary systems beyond the solar system has revealed a diversity of architectures, most of which differ significantly from our system. The initial detection of an exoplanet is often followed by subsequent discoveries…
Galactic science encompasses a wide range of subjects in the study of the Milky Way and Magellanic Clouds, from Young Stellar Objects to X-ray Binaries. Mapping these populations, and exploring transient phenomena within them, are among the…
Enceladus, an icy moon of Saturn, possesses an internal water ocean and jets expelling ocean material into space. Cassini investigations indicated that the subsurface ocean could be a habitable environment having a complex interaction with…
The objective of this White Paper submitted to ESA's Voyage 2050 call is to get a more holistic knowledge of the dynamics of the Martian plasma system from its surface up to the undisturbed solar wind outside of the induced magnetosphere.…
Ground-based near-IR observations have revealed that Uranus anomalously hot upper atmosphere, detected by Voyager 2, has been steadily cooling. The observed $H_3^+$ and $H_2$ emission-line spectra probe Uranus' ionosphere and thermosphere,…
The energy density of the Universe is dominated by dark energy and dark matter, two mysterious components which pose some of the most important questions in fundamental science today. Euclid is a high-precision survey mission designed to…
For the first time in human history, technologies have matured sufficiently to enable a mission capable of discovering and characterizing habitable planets like Earth orbiting sunlike stars other than the Sun. At the same time, such a…
Uranus and Neptune form a distinct class of planets in our solar system. Given this fact, and ubiquity of similar-mass planets in other planetary systems, it is essential to understand their interior structure and composition. However,…
From 31 Earth-based and three Voyager 2 occultations spanning 1977--2006, we determine the orbital elements of the nine main Uranian rings with typical RMS residuals of 0.2 -- 0.4 km and 1-$\sigma$ errors in $a, ae,$ and $a\sin i$ of order…
The origin of the high inclination of Uranus' spin-axis (Uranus' obliquity) is one of the great unanswered questions about the Solar system. Giant planets are believed to form with nearly zero obliquity, and it has been shown that the…
Solaris is a transformative Solar Polar Discovery-class mission concept to address crucial outstanding questions that can only be answered from a polar vantage. Solaris will image the Sun's poles from ~75 degree latitude, providing new…
Executive Summary: The Habitable Worlds Observatory (HWO) is the first astrophysics flagship mission with a key cross-divisional astrobiology science goal of searching for signs of life on rocky planets beyond our solar system. The Living…
As we become aware of Earth's changing climate, and as we discover terrestrial planets in other solar systems, we gain ever more reasons to study the Earth's nearest neighbour and closest sibling, the only Earth-sized planet besides our own…
We review the importance of recent UV observations of solar system targets and discuss the need for further measurements, instrumentation and laboratory work in the coming decade. In the past decade, numerous important advances have been…
Remote sensing observations suffer significant limitations when used to study the bulk atmospheric composition of the giant planets of our solar system. This impacts our knowledge of the formation of these planets and the physics of their…