Deep Drilling Fields for Solar System Science

TL;DR

This paper proposes a deep drilling field strategy with LSST to discover and characterize thousands of Kuiper Belt Objects, providing insights into Solar System formation and evolution.

Contribution

It introduces a dedicated deep drilling field approach to detect faint KBOs down to 25 km size, enhancing understanding of Solar System history.

Findings

Discovered approximately 10,000 KBOs with the proposed method.

Achieved size and shape distribution measurements down to 25 km.

Estimated total observation time of 40 hours over ten years.

Abstract

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.