Related papers: The Big Occulting Steerable Satellite (BOSS)

With several detections, the technique of gravitational microlensing has proven useful for studying planets that orbit stars at Galactic distances, and it can even be applied to detect planets in neighbouring galaxies. So far, planet…

A novel method of generating artificial scintillation noise is developed and used to evaluate occultation rates and false positive rates for surveys probing the Kuiper Belt with the method of serendipitous stellar occultations. A thorough…

The ESA Euclid mission will survey more than 14,000 deg$^2$ of the sky in visible and near-infrared wavelengths, mapping the extra-galactic sky to constrain our cosmological model of the Universe. Although the survey focusses on regions…

The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) is conceived as an 8.4-m telescope with CCD or CMOS focal plane covering most of a field 0.6 m in diameter, the latter exceeding the size of the largest photographic plates ever used in astronomy.…

We propose an object detection algorithm which is efficient and fast enough to be used in (almost) real time with the limited computer capacities onboard satellites. For stars below the saturation limit of the CCD detectors it is based on a…

Stellar occultations by asteroids and outer solar system bodies can offer ground based observers with modest telescopes and camera equipment the opportunity to probe the shape, size, atmosphere and attendant moons or rings of these distant…

The next generation of exoplanet space photometry missions proposed by both NASA and ESA promise to discover small transiting planets around the nearest and brightest main-sequence stars. The physical and rotational properties of these…

A large wide-field telescope and camera with optical throughput over 200 m^2 deg^2 -- a factor of 50 beyond what we currently have -- would enable the detection of faint moving or bursting optical objects: from Earth threatening asteroids…

To study the population properties of small, remote objects beyond Neptune's orbit in the outer solar system, of kilometer size or smaller, serendipitous occultation search is so far the only way. For hectometer-sized Trans-Neptunian…

Interstellar dust is still the dominant uncertainty in Astronomy, limiting precision in e.g., cosmological distance estimates and models of how light is re-processed within a galaxy. When a foreground galaxy serendipitously overlaps a more…

We present an algorithm capable of detecting diffuse, dim sources of any size in an astronomical image. These sources often defeat traditional methods for source finding, which expand regions around points of high intensity. Extended…

All four giant planets in the Solar system possess irregular satellites, characterized by large, highly eccentric and/or inclined orbits that are distinct from the nearly circular, uninclined orbits of the regular satellites. This…

We test the impact of some systematic errors in weak lensing magnification measurements with the COSMOS 30-band photo-$z$ Survey flux limited to $I_{auto}<25.0$ using correlations of both source galaxy counts and magnitudes. Systematic…

Context. The PLAnetary Transits and Oscillations of stars (PLATO) mission will observe the same area of the sky continuously for at least two years in an effort to detect transit signals of an Earth-like planet orbiting a solar-like star.…

The Chasing All Transients Constellation Hunters (CATCH) space mission plans to launch three types of micro-satellites (A, B, and C). The type-B CATCH satellites are dedicated to locating transients and detecting their time-dependent energy…

The proposed Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) will survey the entire sky to locate the nearest and brightest transiting extrasolar planets with orbital periods up to about 36 days. Here we estimate the number and kind of…

For the majority of optical observing programs, the sky brightness provides the fundamental limit to signal detection such that the scientific feasibility is largely dictated by the moon phase. Since most observatories do not have the…

The Chinese Space Station Optical Survey (CSS-OS) is a mission to explore the vast universe. This mission will equip a 2-meter space telescope to perform a multi-band NUV-optical large area survey (over 40% of the sky) and deep survey (~1%…

Stellar occultations provide a powerful tool to explore objects of the outer solar system. The Gaia mission now provides milli-arcsec accuracy on the predictions of these events and makes possible observations that were previously…

The Burst and Transient Source Experiment (BATSE), aboard the Compton Gamma Ray Observatory (CGRO), provided a record of the low-energy gamma-ray sky (20-1000 keV) between 1991 April and 2000 May (9.1y). Using the Earth Occultation…