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J. A. Larsen (LPL, University of Arizona), Spacewatch Team
Spacewatch is currently reprocessing over 2 Terabytes of archival scans from their 0.9-meter telescope on Kitt Peak. These scans represent 75,000 square degrees of sky surveyed since 1990 with a limiting magnitude of V=21.7. Our reprocessing effort uses improved motion detection software and transforms the scans into FITS format on random access media. We present a progress report on this effort and a summary of our pipeline techniques and resulting data products.
The first scientific result of this effort is a survey for bright Transneptunian and Centaur asteroids. Using 331 scans selected between September of 1995 and September of 1999, we discovered five Transneptunians, three Centaurs and two Scattered Disk Objects. In objects per square degree brighter than R=21.5, we find cumulative sky densities in objects per square degree of 0.017 for Transneptunians, 0.017 for Centaurs and 0.007 for Scattered Disk Objects. We present our analysis and results for this work.
This project is made possible by NASA grant NAGS-8095 through the Applied Information Systems Research Program.
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