Interstellar Updates

OHB System to sign PLATO construction contract in June
http://spacenews.com/ohb-system-to-sign-plato-construction-contract-in-june/

Relativistic solar sails
http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1361-6404/aaa341

A High-performance Atmospheric Radiation Package: with applications to the radiative energy budgets of giant planets
https://arxiv.org/abs/1806.02573

Modeling Indications of Technology in Planetary Transit Light Curves — Dark-side illumination
https://arxiv.org/abs/1505.07399

Similarity indexing of exoplanets in search for potential habitability: application to Mars-like worlds
https://arxiv.org/abs/1608.06702

Internal Structure of Giant and Icy Planets: Importance of Heavy Elements and Mixing
https://arxiv.org/abs/1705.09320

Earth Similarity Index and Habitability Studies of Exoplanets
https://arxiv.org/abs/1801.07101

Spitzer Space Telescope: Innovations and Optimizations in the Extended Mission Era
https://arc.aiaa.org/doi/pdf/10.2514/6.2018-2350

Simulating Transits of Large Objects at the L1 Lagrange Point for the 2018 Feature Film Clara
http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/2515-5172/aaa4be

Magnetised winds and their influence in the escaping upper atmosphere of HD 209458b
https://arxiv.org/abs/1806.02259

SBAF: A New Activation Function for Artificial Neural Net based Habitability Classification
https://arxiv.org/abs/1806.01844

Unbiased Inference of the Masses of Transiting Planets from Radial Velocity Follow-up
http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/2515-5172/aac2c1

Exocomet Orbit Fitting: Accelerating Coma Absorption During Transits of β Pictoris
https://arxiv.org/abs/1806.01284

Scattering of exocomets by a planet chain: exozodi levels and the delivery of cometary material to inner planets
https://arxiv.org/abs/1806.01289

Suppression of atmospheric recycling of planets embedded in a protoplanetary disc by buoyancy barrier
https://arxiv.org/abs/1806.01695

Fine-resolution analysis of exoplanetary distributions by wavelets: hints of an overshooting iceline accumulation
https://arxiv.org/abs/1712.06374

WASP-104b is Darker than Charcoal
https://arxiv.org/abs/1804.05334

The Gaia-ESO Survey: properties of newly discovered Li-rich giants
https://arxiv.org/abs/1805.07077

Remote Sensing of Homochirality: A Proxy for the Detection of Extraterrestrial Life
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/B9780444640277000021

Starshot Sail Bidders Briefing
http://breakthroughinitiatives.org/i/docs/StarshotSail.zip

Re-Thinking Law for a Spacefaring Civilization (pg. 23-25)
http://astrosociology.org/Library/PDF/Newsletters/ARI-Newsletter_Vol-6_Iss-1-2017.pdf

The researchers who study alien linguistics
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-05310-x

A Deep Radio Limit for the TRAPPIST-1 System
https://arxiv.org/abs/1806.00480

A Balanced Budget View on Forming Giant Planets by Pebble Accretion
https://arxiv.org/abs/1806.00487

On the Feasibility of Intense Radial Velocity Surveys for Earth-twin Discoveries
https://arxiv.org/abs/1806.00518

Two planetary systems with transiting Earth-size and super-Earth planets orbiting late-type dwarf stars
https://arxiv.org/abs/1806.01181

K2-231 b: A sub-Neptune exoplanet transiting a solar twin in Ruprecht 147
https://arxiv.org/abs/1803.07430

NASA Narrows Scope for Proposed Astrophysics Missions
https://www.nasa.gov/feature/nasa-narrows-scope-for-proposed-astrophysics-missions

The Ladder of Life Detection
https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/10.1089/ast.2017.1773

Is extraterrestrial life suppressed on subsurface ocean worlds due to the paucity of bioessential elements?
https://arxiv.org/abs/1806.00018

Migration of planets in circumbinary discs
https://arxiv.org/abs/1806.00314

Classifying Exoplanets with Gaussian Mixture Model
https://arxiv.org/abs/1708.00605