Related papers: Star-based Navigation in the Outer Solar System
The advent of Gaia, capable of measuring stellar wobbles caused by orbiting planets, raised an interest to the astrometric detection of exoplanets. Another source of such wobbles (often also called jitter) is stellar magnetic activity. A…
We present the results of realistic end-to-end simulations of observations of nearby stars with the proposed global astrometry mission GAIA, recently recommended within the context of ESA's Horizon 2000 Plus long-term scientific program. We…
We investigate the use of a point cloud measurement in terrain-aided navigation. Our goal is to aid an inertial navigation system, by exploring ways to generate a useful measurement innovation error for effective nonlinear state estimation.…
Stars are uniform spheres, but only to first order. The way in which stellar rotation and magnetism break this symmetry places important observational constraints on stellar magnetic fields, and factors in the assessment of the impact of…
We report techniques and results of a Palomar 200-inch (5 m) adaptive optics imaging survey of sub-stellar companions to solar-type stars. The survey consists of Ks coronagraphic observations of 21 FGK dwarfs out to 20 pc (median distance…
We derive an exact deterministic nonlinear observer to compute the continuous state of an inertial navigation system based on partial discrete measurements, the so-called strapdown problem. Nonlinear contraction is used as the main analysis…
As the NASA Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) fulfills its primary mission it is executing an unprecedented all-sky survey with the potential to discover distant planets in our own solar system, as well as hundreds of…
The concept of a stare-mode astrometric space mission is introduced. The traditionally accepted mode of operation for a mapping astrometric space mission is that of a continuously scanning satellite, like the successful Hipparcos and…
Tetrahedral configurations of spacecraft on unperturbed heliocentric orbits allow for highly precise observations of small spatial changes in the gravitational field, especially those affecting the gravity gradient tensor (GGT). The…
Stellar variability is a key obstacle in reaching the sensitivity required to recover Earth-like exoplanetary signals using the radial velocity (RV) detection method. To explore activity signatures in Sun-like stars, we present SolAster, a…
We propose a novel method applied to extrasolar planetary dynamics to describe the system stability. The observations in this field serve the measurements mainly of radial velocity, transit time, and/or celestial position. These scalar time…
The study of stellar oscillations - asteroseismology - has revolutionized our understanding of the physical properties of the Sun, and similar potential for other stars has been demonstrated in recent years. In particular, asteroseismic…
This study presents an autonomous orbit determination system based on crosslink radiometric measurements applied to a future lunar CubeSat mission to clearly highlight its advantages with respect to existing ground-based navigation…
Exoplanet detection with precise radial velocity (RV) observations is currently limited by spurious RV signals introduced by stellar activity. We show that machine learning techniques such as linear regression and neural networks can…
We address the issue of relativistic stellar aberration requirements for the Space Interferometry Mission (SIM). Motivated by the importance of this issue for SIM, we have considered a problem of relative astrometric observations of two…
Using a portable star tracking system, we are able to obtain the geographical position of the observer, longitude, latitude and North direction. In this work, a new optimization method has been applied to improve accuracy in calculation of…
This work investigates the use of stellar occultation measurements to enhance the orbit determination performance of the Lunar Meteoroid Impact Observer (LUMIO) mission, operating from a quasi-Halo orbit around the Earth-Moon L2 point.…
In the absence of an absolute positioning system, such as GPS, autonomous vehicles are subject to accumulation of positional error which can interfere with reliable performance. Improved navigational accuracy without GPS enables vehicles to…
This work is devoted to generating optimal guidance commands in real time for attitude-constrained solar sailcrafts in coplanar circular-to-circular interplanetary transfers. Firstly, a nonlinear optimal control problem is established, and…
We apply the statistical methods by Schoenrich, Binney & Asplund to assess the quality of distances and kinematics in the RAVE-TGAS and LAMOST-TGAS samples of Solar neighbourhood stars. These methods yield a nominal distance accuracy of…