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The Trans-Neptunian Automated Occultation Survey ( TAOS II )

2017; Cambridge University Press; Volume: 14; Issue: S339 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1017/s1743921318002557

1743-9221

M. J. Lehner, Shiang‐Yu Wang, M. Reyes‐Ruiz, Z. W. Zhang, L. Figueroa, Chung-Kai Huang, W-L. Yen, Charles Alcock, F. Alvarez Santana, J. H. Castro-Chacón, W. P. Chen, You‐Hua Chu, K. H. Cook, John C. Geary, Betsy Hernandez, Jennifer L. Karr, J. J. Kavelaars, Timothy Norton, Andrew Szentgyorgyi,

Stellar, planetary, and galactic studies

Abstract TAOS II is a next-generation occultation survey with the goal of measuring the size distribution of the small end of the Kuiper Belt (objects with diameters 0.5–30 km). Such objects have magnitudes r > 30, and are thus undetectable by direct imaging. The project will operate three telescopes at San Pedro Mártir Observatory in Baja California, México. Each telescope will be equipped with a custom-built camera comprised of a focal-plane array of CMOS imagers. The cameras will be capable of reading out image data from 10,000 stars at a cadence of 20 Hz. The telescopes will monitor the same set of stars simultaneously to search for coincident occultation detections, thus minimising the false-positive rate. This talk described the project, and reported on the progress of the development of the survey infrastructure.