For hundreds of years, the Solar System and its planetary bodies were the only example in which to base our models of planet formation and evolution. With the discovery of exoplanets, a much greater diversity of planetary types and system architectures have been uncovered. Nevertheless, the Solar System planets remain our best test bed to

Small bodies are rocky and/or icy objects, usually ranging in size from a few meters to a few hundreds of kilometers. They comprise near-Earth and main belt asteroids, Jupiter Trojans, trans-Neptunian objects, Centaurs, comets, and a recently discovered category called the transitional objects. Their physical nature, distribution, formation, and

Over the past two decades, enormous advances in the detection of exoplanets have taken place. Currently, we have discovered hundreds of Earth-sized planets, several of them within the habitable zone of their star. In the coming years, the efforts will concentrate in the characterization of these planets and their atmospheres to try to detect the

The XO project aims at detecting transiting exoplanets around bright stars from the ground using small telescopes. The original configuration of XO (McCullough et al. 2005) has been changed and extended as described here. The instrumental setup consists of three identical units located at different sites, each composed of two lenses equipped with

The OSIRIS‐REx Asteroid Sample Return Mission is the third mission in National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)'s New Frontiers Program and is the first U.S. mission to return samples from an asteroid to Earth. The most important decision ahead of the OSIRIS‐REx team is the selection of a prime sample‐site on the surface of asteroid

This chapter reviews our current knowledge of metal-poor ultracool dwarfs with spectral types later than M7. The current census of M, L, and T subdwarfs is explored. The main color trends of subdwarfs from the optical to the mid-infrared are described and their spectral features presented, which led to a preliminary and tentative spectral