TAOS

Introduction

The project website

More than sixty small planetary bodies with radii > 100 km have recently been detected beyond Neptune using large telescopes. The purpose of the TAOS project is to measure directly the number of these KBOs down to the typical size of cometary nuclei (a few km). When a KBO moves in between the earth and a distant star it will block the starlight momentarily. A telescope monitoring the starlight will thus see it blinking. Four small (20 inch) fast (f/1.9) wide-field (2 square degrees) robotic telescopes equipped with 2,048 x 2,048 CCD cameras are operated in a coincidence mode to reduce the false alarm rate down to 10-11 so that the sequence and timing of the three separate blinkings can be used to distinguish real events from false alarms. TAOS will increase our knowledge about the Kuiper Belt, the home of most short period comets that return to the inner solar system every few years.

The schematic view for the concept of TAOS Project