Related papers: SuperWASP: Wide Angle Search for Planets
We discuss the in-flight autonomous assembly as the means to build advanced planetary science payloads to explore the outer regions of the solar system. These payloads are robotically constructed from modular parts delivered by a group of…
Transiting planets provide unique opportunities for the atmospheric characterization of exoplanets as they can reveal composition and the temperature structures at the day-night terminator regions in planetary atmospheres, and help…
The Ultraviolet Transient Astronomical Satellite (ULTRASAT) is a scientific UV space telescope that will operate in geostationary orbit. The mission, targeted to launch in 2024, is led by the Weizmann Institute of Science (WIS) in Israel…
With a collecting area of 70 000 m^2, the Five hundred metre Aperture Spherical Telescope (FAST) will allow for great advances in pulsar astronomy. We have performed simulations to estimate the number of previously unknown pulsars FAST will…
ASTEP South is the first phase of the ASTEP project (Antarctic Search for Transiting ExoPlanets). The instrument is a fixed 10 cm refractor with a 4kx4k CCD camera in a thermalized box, pointing continuously a 3.88 degree x 3.88 degree…
Balloon-borne astronomy is unique in that it allows for a level of image stability, resolution, and optical backgrounds that are comparable to space-borne systems due to greatly reduced atmospheric interference, but at a fraction of the…
The search for biosignatures in potentially habitable exoplanets is one of the major astrophysics' drivers for the coming decades, and the prime science goal of the HWO NASA mission, a large UV-Optical-IR space telescope to be launched in…
Hyper Suprime-Cam (HSC) is a wide-field imaging camera on the prime focus of the 8.2m Subaru telescope on the summit of Maunakea in Hawaii. A team of scientists from Japan, Taiwan and Princeton University is using HSC to carry out a…
The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) is uniquely equipped to search for Solar System bodies due to its unprecedented combination of depth and wide field coverage. Over a ten-year period starting in 2022, LSST will generate the largest…
We present the prototype telescope for the Next Generation Transit Survey, which was built in the UK in 2008/09 and tested on La Palma in the Canary Islands in 2010. The goals for the prototype system were severalfold: to determine the…
The Joint Milliarcsecond Pathfinder Survey (JMAPS) is a Department of Navy bright star astrometric all-sky survey scheduled for launch in the 2012 timeframe. Mission objectives include a complete update of star positions for the 2015 epoch…
The Very Energetic Radiation Imaging Telescope Array System (VERITAS) represents an important step forward in the study of extreme astrophysical processes in the universe. It combines the power of the atmospheric Cherenkov imaging technique…
We report on the current status of the University of New South Wales Extrasolar Planet Search project, giving details of the methods we use to obtain millimagnitude precision photometry using the 0.5m Automated Patrol Telescope. We use a…
There have been previous hints that the transiting planet WASP-3 b is accompanied by a second planet in a nearby orbit, based on small deviations from strict periodicity of the observed transits. Here we present 17 precise radial velocity…
The navigation systems of autonomous aircraft rely on the readings provided by a suite of onboard sensors to estimate the aircraft state. In the case of fixed wing vehicles, the sensor suite is composed by triads of accelerometers,…
The overarching goal of planetary astronomy is to deduce how the present collection of objects found in our Solar System were formed from the original material present in the proto-solar nebula. As over two hundred exo-planetary systems are…
The Breakthrough Starshot project aims to send centimeter-sized, gram-scale "StarChip" probes to Alpha Centauri at a speed of $\sim0.2c$. On the other hand, Zhang \& Li recently proposed that trans-relativistic cameras may be sent to any…
We propose to use Kepler in 2-wheel mode to conduct a detailed search for Earth-sized planets orbiting ultra-cool stars and brown dwarfs (spectral types from M7 to L3). This population of objects presents several advantages for exoplanet…
The Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) is a project to definitively map $\pi$ steradians of the local Universe. An array of CCD detectors used in drift-scan mode will digitally image the sky in five passbands to a limiting magnitude of $r'…
Organized Autotelescopes for Serendipitous Event Survey (OASES) is an optical observation project that aims to detect and investigate stellar occultation events by kilometer-sized trans-Neptunian objects (TNOs). In this project, multiple…