Demographics of the Short Period Comets

The demographics of the short period comets is not very well understood. In order to create an accurate synthetic population of object to be used in the testing and prediction of the efficiency of the upcoming Pan-STARRS project, we have used two years of minor planet observations reported by the LINEAR survey to construct a model of the underlying cometary population.

We find that the known population of Jupiter family comets are the visible portion of two populations, one with aphelia at Jupiter and another with aphelia at Saturn. Furthermore the population of small short period comets is found to be larger than previously thought. In this talk we present the synthetic model and its implication and prospects for science with Pan-STARRS and LSST.