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Status of the Transneptunian Automated Occultation Survey (TAOS II)

2016; SPIE; Volume: 9906; Linguagem: Inglês

10.1117/12.2232203

1996-756X

M. J. Lehner, Shiang‐Yu Wang, M. Reyes‐Ruiz, Charles Alcock, J. H. Castro-Chacón, Wen-Ping Chen, You‐Hua Chu, Kem H. Cook, Liliana Figueroa, John C. Geary, Chung-Kai Huang, Dae Won Kim, Timothy Norton, Andrew Szentgyorgyi, Wei-Ling Yen, Zhi-Wei Zhang,

Stellar, planetary, and galactic studies

The Transneptunian Automated Occultation Survey (TAOS II) will aim to detect occultations of stars by small (~1 km diameter) objects in the Kuiper Belt and beyond. Such events are very rare (< 10 −3 events per star per year) and short in duration (~200 ms), so many stars must be monitored at a high readout cadence. TAOS II will operate three 1.3 meter telescopes at the Observatorio Astronómico Nacional at San Pedro Mártir in Baja California, México. With a 2.3 square degree field of view and a high speed camera comprising CMOS imagers, the survey will monitor 10,000 stars simultaneously with all three telescopes at a readout cadence of 20 Hz. Construction of the site began in the fall of 2013, and the survey will begin in the summer of 2017.