TAOS: An Occultation Survey of the Outer Solar System
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)1 is currently being constructed. This next generation survey will be more than one hundred times as sensitive as the earlier survey. In my talk I will present the results of TAOS I, discuss the future plans of the survey, and provide a detailed description of the TAOS II project.
- Publication:
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EPSC-DPS Joint Meeting 2011
- Pub Date:
- October 2011
- Bibcode:
- 2011epsc.conf..355L