Related papers: A High-Altitude, Station-Keeping Astronomical Plat…
The "Airships: A New Horizon for Science" study at the Keck Institute for Space Studies investigated the potential of a variety of airships currently operable or under development to serve as observatories and science instrumentation…
The continued exploration of Mars will require a greater number of in-space assets to aid interplanetary communications. Future missions to the surface of Mars may be augmented with stationary satellites that remain overhead at all times as…
This manuscript contains a description and basic principles for observing inaccessible areas using low cost, easily deployed equipment. The basic premise is to suspend a tiny video camera at an altitude of 10 - 200 meters over the area to…
During certain times of the year at middle and low latitudes, winds in the upper stratosphere move in nearly the opposite direction than the wind in the lower stratosphere. Here we present a method for maintaining a high-altitude balloon…
The historical development of ground based astronomical telescopes leads us to expect that space-based astronomical telescopes will need to be operational for many decades. The exchange of scientific instruments in space will be a…
Micro-Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are rapidly expanding into tasks from inventory to environmental sensing, yet their short endurance and unreliable navigation in GPS-denied spaces limit deployment. Lighter-Than-Air (LTA) drones offer…
Aerial communication platforms, stratospheric high-altitude platform stations (HAPS), have the potential to provide/catalyze advanced mobile wireless communication services with its ubiquitous connectivity and ultra-wide coverage radius.…
Variability in the sky has been known for centuries, even millennia, but our knowledge of it is very incomplete even at the bright end. Current technology makes it possible to built small, robotic optical instruments, to record images and…
Theory and computations are provided for building of optimal (minimum weight) solid space towers (mast) up to one hundred kilometers in height. These towers can be used for tourism; scientific observation of space, observation of the Earth…
The signals that will be received on Earth from deep-space probes in future implementations of free-space optical communication will be extremely weak, and new ground stations will have to be developed in order to support these links. This…
An array of large observational programs using ground-based and space-borne telescopes is planned in the next decade. The forthcoming wide-field sky surveys are expected to deliver a sheer volume of data exceeding an exabyte. Processing the…
Because of the scheduled GLAST mission by NASA, there is strong scientific justification for preparation for very extensive blazar monitoring in the optical bands to exploit the opportunity to learn about blazars through the correlation of…
The past fifty years have been an epoch of impressive progress in the field of astronomical technology. Practically all the technical tools, which we use today, have been developed during that time span. While the first half of this period…
The lunar surface is a compelling location for large, distributed optical facilities, with significant advantages over orbital facilities for high spatial resolution astrophysics. The serious development of mission concepts is timely…
Astronomy has a distinguished tradition of using technology to accelerate the quality and effectiveness of science, and data-intensive initiatives such as the Virtual Observatory lead the way amongst other fields of science. However,…
Observatories are complex scientific and technical institutions serving diverse users and purposes. Their telescopes, instruments, software, and human resources engage in interwoven workflows over a broad range of timescales. These…
The Advanced Technology Large Aperture Space Telescope (ATLAST) is a set of mission concepts for the next generation UV-Optical-Near Infrared space telescope with an aperture size of 8 to 16 meters. ATLAST, using an internal coronagraph or…
The possibility of using the SKA for occasional support of scientific space missions should be considered, along with all other science goals, in the design of the array. The benefits of higher data rates from distant spacecraft during high…
With the new discoveries enabled thanks to the recent space missions, stellar physics is going through a revolution. However, these discoveries opened the door to many new questions that require more observations. The European Space…
For decades, satellites have facilitated remote internet of things (IoT) services. However, the recent proliferation of increasingly capable sensors and a surge in the number deployed, has led to a substantial growth in the volume of data…