Deep Drilling Fields for Solar System Science
David E. Trilling, Michele Bannister, Cesar Fuentes, David Gerdes, Michael Mommert, Megan E. Schwamb, Chad Trujillo
(Submitted on 23 Dec 2018)
We propose an ecliptic Deep Drilling Field that will discover some 10,000~small and faint Kuiper Belt Objects (KBOs) — primitive rocky/icy bodies that orbit at the outside of our Solar System and uniquely record the processes of planetary system formation and evolution. The primary goals are to measure the KBO size and shape distributions down to 25~km, a size that probes both the early and ongoing evolution of this population. These goals can be met with around 10~hours total of on-sky time (five separate fields that are observed for 2.1~hours each). Additional science will result from downstream observations that provide colors and orbit refinement, for a total time request of 40~hours over the ten year LSST main survey.
Comments: White Paper submitted in response to the Call for LSST Cadence Optimization White Papers
Subjects: Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics (astro-ph.IM); Earth and Planetary Astrophysics (astro-ph.EP)
Cite as: arXiv:1812.09705 [astro-ph.IM] (or arXiv:1812.09705v1 [astro-ph.IM] for this version)
Submission history
From: David E. Trilling
[v1] Sun, 23 Dec 2018 13:27:53 UTC (1,316 KB)
