A brief review is presented of infrared astronomical instrumentation which has been proposed or accepted for observations from space platforms. Some stress is placed on cryogenic design problems which have hitherto formed barriers to progress. Technical solutions to problems are outlined, and steps in implementing some of them are described.

The CoRoT satellite has provided high-precision photometric light curves for more than 163 000 stars and found several hundreds of transiting systems compatible with a planetary scenario. If ground-based velocimetric observations are the best way to identify the actual planets among many possible configurations of eclipsing binary systems, recent

One of the objectives of the CoRoT mission is the search for transiting extrasolar planets using high-precision photometry, and the accurate characterization of their fundamental parameters. The CoRoT satellite consecutively observes crowded stellar fields since February 2007, in high-cadence precise photometry; periodic eclipses are detected and

The discovery of very high energy (VHE) gamma-ray emitting X-ray binaries has triggered an intense effort to better understand the particle acceleration, absorption, and emission mechanisms in compact binary systems, which provide variable conditions along eccentric orbits. Despite this, the nature of some of these systems, and of the accelerated

We present coincident observations of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) from the Very Small Array (VSA) and Cosmic Background Imager (CBI) telescopes. The consistency of the full data sets is tested in the map plane and the Fourier plane, prior to the usual compression of CMB data into flat bandpowers. Of the three mosaics observed by each

This paper presents the first results obtained with the Jodrell Bank-IAC two-element 33-GHz interferometer. The instrument was designed to measure the level of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) fluctuations at angular scales of 1 deg-2 deg. The observations analysed here were taken in a strip of the sky at Dec.=+41 deg with an element