Related papers: Star-based Navigation in the Outer Solar System
Due to the strong dependency of our societies onGlobal Navigation Satellite Systems and their vulnerability to outages, there is an urgent need for additional navigation systems. A possible approach for such an additional system uses the…
Autonomous navigation in unstructured natural environments poses a significant challenge. In goal navigation tasks without prior information, the limited look-ahead of onboard sensors utilised by robots compromises path efficiency. We…
Satellite-based solar irradiation forecasting is useful for short-term intra-day time horizons, outperforming numerical weather predictions up to 3-4 hours ahead. The main techniques for solar satellite forecast are based on sophisticated…
Context. The Kepler space mission led to a large amount of high-precision time series of solar-like oscillators. Using a Bayesian analysis that combines asteroseismic techniques and additional ground-based observations, the mass, radius,…
Fully re-orientable small spacecraft are now supported by commercial technologies, allowing them to point their instruments in any direction and capture images, with short notice. When combined with improved onboard processing, and…
The NEAT (Nearby Earth Astrometric Telescope) mission is a proposition submitted to ESA for its 2010 call for M-size mission. The main scientific goal is to detect and characterize planetary systems in an exhaustive way down to 1 Earth mass…
We study the optimal control of an arbitrarily large constellation of small satellites operating in low Earth orbit. Simulating the lack of on-board propulsion, we limit our actuation to the use of differential drag maneuvers to make…
The timing and duration of exoplanet transits has a dependency on observer position due to parallax. In the case of an Earth-bound observer with a 2 AU baseline the dependency is typically small and slightly beyond the limits of current…
High precision and long-lasting \emph{Kepler} data enabled us to estimate stellar properties with asteroseismology as an accurate tool. We performed asteroseismic analysis on six solar-like stars observed by the \emph{Kepler} mission: KIC…
With the growing number of projects dedicated to the search for extrasolar planets via transits, there is a need to develop fast, automatic, robust methods with a statistical background in order to efficiently do the analysis. We propose a…
We present the first space-based microlens parallax measurement of an isolated star. From the striking differences in the lightcurve as seen from Earth and from Spitzer (~1 AU to the West), we infer a projected velocity v_helio,projected ~…
The fields of occultation and microlensing are linked historically. Early this century, occultation of the Sun by the Moon allowed the apparent positions of background stars projected near the limb of the Sun to be measured and compared…
We present an efficient technique to study the 1D evolution of instability-generated structure in winds of hot stars out to very large distances (more than 1000 stellar radii). This technique makes use of our previous finding that external…
Astrometric detection of an unseen companion is based on analysis of apparent motion of its host star around the system's barycentre. Systems with orbital period close to one year may escape detection if orbital motion of their host stars…
Advances in asteroseismology of solar-like stars, now provide a unique method to estimate the stellar inclination $i_{\star}$. This enables to evaluate the spin-orbit angle of transiting planetary systems, in a complementary fashion to the…
We present here a method for the relativistic positioning in spacetime based on the reception of pulses from sources of electromagnetic signals whose worldline is known. The method is based on the use of a four-dimensional grid covering the…
Aims: Stellar activity may complicate the analysis of high-precision radial-velocity spectroscopic data when looking for exoplanets signatures. We aim at quantifying the impact of stellar spots on stars with various spectral types and…
The precise radial velocity technique is a cornerstone of exoplanetary astronomy. Astronomers measure Doppler shifts in the star's spectral features, which track the line-of/sight gravitational accelerations of a star caused by the planets…
Our knowledge of the Sun, its atmosphere, long term activity and space weather potential is severely limited by the lack of good observations of the polar and far-side regions. Observations from a polar vantage point would revolutionize our…
Most current astronomical adaptive optics (AO) systems rely on the availability of a bright star to measure the distortion of the incoming wavefront. Replacing the guide star with an artificial laser beacon alleviates this dependency on…