Janet P. Wu

TL;DR: A simplified approach toward addressing the worst-case link conditions for a spacecraft orbiting Mars, namely, maximum range and minimum sun-Earth-probe (SEP) angle of 3-10° is considered and a lower bound of ~100 Gbits/day under the most stressing link conditions is estimated possible.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors present the current design of the coronagraph instrument point design for the Wide Field Infrared Survey Telescope (WFIRST) flight mission, which is based on the existing Astrophysics Focused Telescope Assets (AFTA) 2.4m telescope.

TL;DR: The Optical Ground Station 1 (OGS1) as discussed by the authors is the first dedicated ground terminal to support NASA's developing space-based optical communications infrastructure, which is based at NASA's Optical Communications Telescope Laboratory (OCTL) at the Table Mountain Observatory near Wrightwood, CA.

TL;DR: In this article, a mission set analysis tool is proposed to forecast future demand by cataloguing the characteristics of potential future DSN-user missions consistent with NASA's Space Communications Mission Model, calculating the demands that these missions will place on the DSN, and generating mission requirements for other DSN architectural analysis tools.

TL;DR: SIM Lite as mentioned in this paper is a space-borne stellar interferometer capable of searching for Earth-size planets in the habitable zones of nearby stars, which will require measurement of astrometric angles with sub micro-arcsecond accuracy and optical pathlength differences to 1 picometer by the end of the five-year mission.