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K. H. Cook (LLNL), D. P. Bennett (Notre Dame), M. Clampin (STScI), A. J. Drake (LLNL), A. Gould (Ohio State), K. Horne (St. Andrews), S. D. Horner (LMSS), D. C. Jewitt (Hawaii), G. I. Langston (NRAO), T. R. Lauer (NOAO), A. Lumsdaine (Notre Dame), D. Minniti (P. Universidad Catolica), S. J. Peale (UCSB), S. H. Rhie (Notre Dame), M. Shao (JPL), R. L. Stevenson (Notre Dame), D. Tenerelli (LMSS), D. Tytler (UCSD), N. J. Woolf (Arizona)
A secondary science goal of the proposed Galactic Exoplanet Survey Telescope (GEST) is to discover ~100,000 new Kuiper Belt Objects (KBOs). Using a fraction of each season when GEST's primary target, the Galactic bulge, is not visible, GEST will survey ~1200 square degrees of sky near the ecliptic plane down to a limiting red magnitude of {\rm R} ~26.5. GEST's KBO survey will be repeated at specific weekly, monthly, and yearly intervals to permit orbit determination. GEST will also do a deep KBO survey which aims to detect KBOs as faint as 29th magnitude in a single 1 square degree field.
The number of KBOs that GEST will discover excedes the number of known KBOs by a factor of ~300 and the number of KBOs expected from other proposed telescopes by a factor of 10. This will enable the measurement of the number of KBOs in the more distant mean motion resonances, the measurement of the radial extent of the Kuiper Belt, and the measurement of the relative abundances of the classical, resonant and scattered KBO populations.
If you would like more information about this abstract, please follow the link to http://bustard.phys.nd.edu/GEST/. This link was provided by the author. When you follow it, you will leave the Web site for this meeting; to return, you should use the Back comand on your browser.
The author(s) of this abstract have provided an email address for comments about the abstract: kcook@igpp.ucllnl.org