The TAOS Robotic Observatory
Abstract
The Taiwanese-American Occultation survey (TAOS) operate four small telescopes in central Taiwan to search for occultations by small (~1 km diameter) Kuiper Belt Objects. The system is fully robotic, requiring human intervention only in the event of hardware failures. However, the status of the system during observations is monitored remotely via smart-phone. A successor survey, the Transneptunian Automated Occultation Survey (TAOS II) is currently being constructed. This next generation survey will be more than one hundred times as sensitive as the earlier survey. In this paper, we summarize the science goals of the surveys, describe the two surveys, and discuss the lessons learned in automating the TAOS observations.
- Publication:
-
Telescopes from Afar
- Pub Date:
- March 2011
- Bibcode:
- 2011tfa..confE..22L