Related papers: OSIRIS-REx Operational Key Decision Points: A Retr…

This paper presents the development and evaluation of an optimization-based autonomous trajectory planning algorithm for the asteroid reconnaissance phase of a deep-space exploration mission. The reconnaissance phase is a low-altitude flyby…

The holy grail of exoplanet searches is an exo-Earth, an Earth mass planet in the habitable zone around a nearby star. Mass is the most important parameter of a planet and can only be measured by observing the motion of the star around the…

We present a novel method for extracting moving objects from TESS data using machine learning. Our approach uses two stacked 3D U-Nets with skip connections, which we call a W-Net, to filter background and identify pixels containing moving…

On September 26, 2022, NASA's Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission successfully impacted Dimorphos, the natural satellite of the binary near-Earth asteroid (65803) Didymos. Numerical simulations of the impact provide a means to…

Wheeled ground robots are limited from exploring extreme environments such as caves, lava tubes and skylights. Small robots that can utilize unconventional mobility through hopping, flying or rolling can overcome these limitations.…

The NASA Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission performed a kinetic impact on asteroid Dimorphos, the satellite of the binary asteroid (65803) Didymos, at 23:14 UTC on September 26, 2022 as a planetary defense test. DART was the…

While no known asteroid poses a threat to Earth for at least the next century, the catalog of near-Earth asteroids is incomplete for objects whose impacts would produce regional devastation. Several approaches have been proposed to…

The addition of an external starshade to the {\it Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope} will enable the direct imaging of Earth-radius planets orbiting at $\sim$1 AU. Classification of any detected planets as Earth-like requires both…

Inspired by the recent 11th Global Trajectory Optimisation Competition, this paper presents the asteroid routing problem (ARP) as a realistic benchmark of algorithms for expensive bound-constrained black-box optimization in permutation…

Exploration of asteroids and comets can give insight into the origins of the solar system and can be instrumental in planetary defence and in-situ resource utilization (ISRU). Asteroids, due to their low gravity are a challenging target for…

OSIRIS is a near-infrared (1.0--2.4 $\mu$m) integral field spectrograph operating behind the adaptive optics system at Keck Observatory, and is one of the first lenslet-based integral field spectrographs. Since its commissioning in 2005, it…

Orbit-determination programs find the orbit solution that best fits a set of observations by minimizing the RMS of the residuals of the fit. For near-Earth asteroids, the uncertainty of the orbit solution may be compatible with trajectories…

Near-Earth asteroid 162173 (1999 JU3) is the primary target of the Hayabusa-2 sample return mission, and a potential target of the Marco Polo sample return mission. Earth-based studies of this object are fundamental to these missions. We…

We present the first results of the Astrometric Reconnaissance of Exoplanetary Systems (ARES) project, aimed at validating and characterizing candidate exoplanets around the nearest systems using multi-epoch Hubble Space Telescope (HST)…

While of order a million asteroids have been discovered, the number in rigorously controlled samples that have precise orbits and rotation periods, as well as well-measured colors, is relatively small. In particular, less than a dozen…

We describe the Pan-STARRS Moving Object Processing System (MOPS), a modern software package that produces automatic asteroid discoveries and identifications from catalogs of transient detections from next-generation astronomical survey…

This study is carried out in the framework of sample-return missions to asteroids that use a low-speed projectile as the primary component of its sampling mechanism (e.g., JAXA's Hayabusa and Hayabusa2 missions). We perform numerical…

The earth's orbit is becoming increasingly crowded with debris that poses significant safety risks to the operation of existing and new spacecraft and satellites. The active tether-net system, which consists of a flexible net with…

This paper presents a comparative study of the applicability and accuracy of optimal control methods and neural network-based estimators in the context of porkchop plots for preliminary asteroid rendezvous mission design. The scenario…

In 2023, the 12th edition of Global Trajectory Competition was organised around the problem referred to as "Sustainable Asteroid Mining". This paper reports the developments that led to the solution proposed by ESA's Advanced Concepts Team.…