Related papers: Ice Giants Pre-Decadal Survey Mission Study Report

When the first CubeSats were launched nearly two decades ago, few people believed that the miniature satellites would likely prove to be a useful scientific tool. Skeptics abounded. However, the last decade has seen the highly successful…

Orbital geophysical investigations of Enceladus are critical to understanding its energy balance. We identified key science questions for the geophysical exploration of Enceladus, answering which would support future assessment of…

Kepler is a NASA mission designed to detect exoplanets and characterize the properties of exoplanetary systems. Kepler also includes an asteroseismic programme which is being conducted through the Kepler Asteroseismic Science Consortium…

The outer solar system provides a unique, quiet vantage point from which to observe the universe around us, where measurements could enable several niche astrophysical science cases that are too difficult to perform near Earth. NASA's New…

The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope is designed to provide an unprecedented optical imaging dataset that will support investigations of our Solar System, Galaxy and Universe, across half the sky and over ten years of repeated observation.…

During the 1970s members of the British Interplanetary Society embarked on a landmark theoretical engineering design study to send a probe to Barnard's star. Project Daedalus was a two-stage vehicle employing electron beam driven inertial…

The authors and co-signers of the Terrestrial Planets Comparative Climatology (TPCC) mission concept white paper advocate that planetary science in the next decade would greatly benefit from comparatively studying the fundamental behavior…

I will highlight and discuss some of the studies of the stellar population in the Galaxy that will become possible with or will greatly advantage of the capability of a Wide Field of view X-ray Telescope (WFXT) mission. This mission…

In this manuscript I summarise the work I have carried out in the last 10 years. My research projects are articulated around various fields in astrophysics having, as unifying theme, the 3D modelling and the observation of stellar…

The past three decades have seen prodigious advances in astronomy and astrophysics. Beginning with the exploration of our solar system and continuing through the pioneering Explorers and Great Observatories of today, NASA missions have made…

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…

We report the outcomes of a survey that explores the current practices, needs and expectations of the astrophysics community, concerning four research aspects: open science practices, data access and management, data visualization, and data…

The Next Generation Sky Survey (NGSS) is a proposed NASA MIDEX mission to map the entire sky in four infrared bandpasses - 3.5, 4.7, 12, and 23 um. The seven-month mission will use a 50-cm telescope and four-channel imager to survey the sky…

As "Space Mobility and Logistics" was listed as one of the five core competencies in the US Space Force's doctrine document, there is a growing interest in developing technologies to enable in-space refueling, servicing, assembly, and…

In this paper we test the hypothesis that the Pioneer anomaly can be of gravitational origin by comparing the predicted model-independent shifts Delta a/a for the semimajor axis of Uranus and Neptune with the Voyager 2 radio-technical…

This white paper proposes that AMBITION, a Comet Nucleus Sample Return mission, be a cornerstone of ESA's Voyage 2050 programme. We summarise some of the most important questions still open in cometary science after the successes of the…

This paper discusses the scientific objectives for the ESA Lunar Lander Mission, which emphasise human exploration preparatory science and introduces the model scientific payload considered as part of the on-going mission studies, in…

NASA's New Horizons (NH) Pluto-Kuiper belt (PKB) mission was launched on 19 January 2006 on a Jupiter Gravity Assist (JGA) trajectory toward the Pluto system for a 14 July 2015 closest approach; Jupiter closest approach occurred on 28…

Orbits of celestial objects, especially the geocentric and heliocentric ones, have been well explored to constrain new long-range forces beyond the Standard Model (SM), often referred to as fifth forces. In this paper, for the first time,…

FINESSE, a NASA MIDEX mission in Step 2, would conduct a large, uniform survey of exoplanet atmospheres and create a statistically significant sample for comparative planetology. FINESSE's technical capabilities, driven by a scientific…