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How should we invest our available resources to best sustain astronomy's track record of discovery, established over the past few decades? Two strong hints come from (1) our history of astronomical discoveries and (2) literature citation…

In the next decade, there is an opportunity for very high return on investment of relatively small budgets by elevating the priority of smallsat funding in heliophysics. We've learned in the past decade that these missions perform…

This paper presents an overview of the U.S. federal civil space budget between FY23 and proposed spending in FY25, providing a foundational reference dataset for civil space budget analyses. Projects that support, enable, or leverage space…

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…

The National Academy of Science Astronomy and Astrophysics Survey Committee, in its new Decadal survey entitled Astronomy and Astrophysics in the New Millennium, recommends, as a first priority, the establishment of a National Virtual…

Astrophysics facilities have been of tremendous importance for planetary science. The flagship space observatory Hubble Space Telescope has produced ground-breaking Solar System science, but when launched it did not even have the capability…

The NASA program in X-ray astronomy has two long term goals: 1) to achieve sufficient angular resolution to image the event horizon of a black hole (0.1 micro arc sec) and 2) to achieve sufficient collecting area (50-150 sq m) and angular…

The US professional astronomy and astrophysics fields are not representative of the diversity of people in the nation. For example, 2017 AIP reports show that in 2014, women made up only about 20 percent of the faculty in astronomy and…

Open-access telescopes of all apertures are needed to operate a competitive and efficient national science program. While larger facilities contribute light-gathering power and angular resolution, smaller ones dominate for field of view,…

We write in response to the call from the 2020 Decadal Survey to submit white papers illustrating the most pressing scientific questions in astrophysics for the coming decade. We propose exploration as the central question for the Decadal…

This invited white paper, submitted to the National Science Foundation in January of 2020, discusses the current challenges faced by the United States astronomical instrumentation community in the era of extremely large telescopes. Some…

The purpose of this white paper is to provide guidance to funding agencies, leaders in the discipline, and its constituent departments about strategies for (1) improving access to advanced education for people from populations that have…

A white paper submitted to the 2025 NASA Decadal Astrobiology Research and Exploration Strategy (DARES) on the importance of early-career training, support, and retention. The paper identifies two goals for NASA Astrobiology regarding early…

NASA's WFIRST mission will perform a wide-field, NIR survey of the Galactic Bulge to search for exoplanets via the microlensing techniques. As the mission is due to launch in the mid-2020s, around half-way through the LSST Main Survey, we…

This document summarises the UK astronomy community's science and technology priorities for funding and investments in the coming decades, following a series of national community consultations by the Astronomy Advisory Panel of the Science…

We advocate for establishing key scientific priorities for the future of Mercury exploration, including the development of specific science goals for a landed mission. We support the Mercury science community in fostering closer…

The new NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS) is designed with a serviceoriented architecture (SOA) that consists of multiple customized Apache Solr search engine instances plus a collection of microservices, containerized using Docker, and…

We give an overview of the science objectives and mission design of the Spectroscopic Time-Resolving Observatory for Broadband Energy X-rays (STROBE-X) observatory, which has been proposed as a NASA probe-class (~$1.5B) mission in response…

In response to the need for the Astro2020 Decadal Survey to explicitly engage early career astronomers, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine hosted the Early Career Astronomer and Astrophysicist Focus Session (ECFS)…

The white paper discusses Arecibo Observatory's plan for facility improvements and activities over the next decade. The facility improvements include: (a) improving the telescope surface, pointing and focusing to achieve superb performance…