Related papers: Observing Near Earth Asteroids with a Small Telesc…
The Gaia mission started its regular observing program in the summer of 2014, and since then it is regularly obtaining observations of asteroids. This paper draws the outline of the data processing for Solar System objects, and in…
Dormant comets in the near-Earth object (NEO) population are thought to be involved in the terrestrial accretion of water and organic materials. Identification of dormant comets is difficult as they are observationally indistinguishable…
<abridged> NASA's Asteroid Redirect Mission (ARM) has been proposed with the aim to capture a small asteroid a few meters in size and redirect it into an orbit around the Moon. There it can be investigated at leisure by astronauts aboard an…
The Gaia satellite, planned for launch by the European Space Agency (ESA) in 2013, is the next generation astrometry mission following Hipparcos. While mapping the whole sky, the Gaia space mission is expected to discover thousands of Solar…
We report radio SETI observations on a large number of known exoplanets and other nearby star systems using the Allen Telescope Array (ATA). Observations were made over about 19000 hours from May 2009 to Dec 2015. This search focused on…
In this white paper (WP), we highlight several examples of small and moderate aperture telescopes that are being used for education and/or research. We further discuss potential costs for establishing new, small observatories, as well as…
Asteroid discoveries are essential for planetary-defense efforts aiming to prevent impacts with Earth, including the more frequent megaton explosions from decameter impactors. While large asteroids ($\geq$100 km) have remained in the main…
The research about asteroids attracts more and more attention recently, especially focusing on their physical structures, such as the spin axis, the rotation period and the shape. The long distance between Earth observers and asteroids…
Transit observations have found the majority of exoplanets to date. Spectroscopic observations of transits and eclipses are the most commonly used tool to characterize exoplanet atmospheres and will be used in the search for life. However,…
The ESA Gaia space astrometry mission will perform an all-sky survey of stellar objects complete in the nominal magnitude range G = [6.0 - 20.0]. The stars with G lower than 6.0, i.e. those visible to the unaided human eye, would thus not…
In recent years there appeared a need for astronomical observations timed with sub-millisecond accuracy. These include e.g. timing stellar occultations by small, sub-km or fast Near Earth Asteroids, but also tracking artificial satellites…
In this paper, the minimum orbit intersection distances (MOIDs) of near-Earth asteroids (NEAs) over the next 200 years were computed and analyzed in detail. It was shown that the MOID of a NEA relative to the Earth-Moon barycenter (EMB) is…
Trigonometric parallaxes measured with ground-based telescopes of the RECONS consortium as part of the CTIOPI program are used to search for stars that have either had an encounter with the solar system in the past or will have such an…
A concept of the ground-based optical astronomical observations efficiency is considered in this paper. We believe that a telescope efficiency can be increased by properly allocating observation tasks with respect to the current environment…
The Earth-skimming $\nu_{\tau}$ method allows for huge target mass and detection volume simultaneously. In part motivated by IceCube PeV astro-neutrino events, the planned NTA observatory has three site stations watching the air mass…
In its all-sky survey, Gaia will monitor astrometrically and photometrically millions of main-sequence stars with sufficient sensitivity to brown dwarf companions within a few AUs from their host stars and to transiting brown dwarfs on very…
Earth's temporarily-captured orbiters (TCOs) are a sub-population of near-Earth objects (NEOs). TCOs can provide constraints for NEO population models in the 1--10-metre-diameter range, and they are outstanding targets for in situ…
We have begun the ExploreNEOs project in which we observe some 700 Near Earth Objects (NEOs) at 3.6 and 4.5 microns with the Spitzer Space Telescope in its Warm Spitzer mode. From these measurements and catalog optical photometry we derive…
The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) provides the opportunity for ground-breaking observations of asteroids. It covers wavelength regions that are unavailable from the ground, and does so with unprecedented sensitivity. The main-belt and…
We detect a cold, terrestrial planet in a binary-star system using gravitational microlensing. The planet has low mass (2 Earth masses) and lies projected at $a_{\perp,ph}$ ~ 0.8 astronomical units (AU) from its host star, similar to the…