Census of Kuiper Comets-the TAOS Project

Cometary nuclei, the remnanticy bodies of planet formation, located at the outer edge of the solar system, are relatively poorly studied because of their small sizes and thus faintness.Thus far more than a hundred large members (size about 100 km)of this cometary population in the Kuiper belt have been identified.Smaller bodies (10 km)are much too faint to image directly and their number sofar can only be extrapolated on theoretical grounds. The Taiwan-America Occultation Survey (TAOS)will conduct a census of the number of Kuiper belt objects down to a few km size by monitoring chance stellar occultations by these cometary nuclei.We will set up an array of small (50cm), wide-field (f/1.9)telescopes, each equipped with a 2K squared CCD camera, along a 7 km baseline in central Taiw an at an elevation above ～3000 m.The robot telescopes will operate in a coincidence mode, so the sequence and timing of any candidate occultation event can be recorded and distinguished against a false detection.The Law rence Livermore National Laboratory, the National Cent ral University, and the Academia Sinica, will each cont ribute one telescope system.Researchers from an international variety of institutes are also participating in the project. Our experiment provides the only means to study the cometary population in the small-sized end of the distrbutio n.A great number of scientific byproducts, notably variable stars, will also derive from the huge TAOS database, some 10, 000 giga-bytes worth of photometrical measuremements per year.