DEEP-South: Preliminary Lightcurve Analysis of Potentially Hazardous Asteroids (PHAs)

Near Earth Asteroid (NEA) population has attracted keen attention not only from the scientific community but from the general public ever since their terrestrial impact risk achieved wide recognition. Potentially Hazardous Asteroids (PHAs), the subset of NEAs, recently became the center of interest of planetary defense folks and mining industry due to their proximity to, and the potential effects on planet Earth. However, we have long been ignorant about either the physical properties or dynamical source regions of individual objects. For instance, their rotational periods are only known for five percent of the total population (The NEA Database of DLR, updated on Feb 2016). The primary scientific objective of DEEP-South (DEep Ecliptic Patrol of the Southern sky) is to physically characterize 70 percent of km-class PHAs until 2019. In order to achieve this goal, we implemented an observation mode so-called "OC (Opposition Census)" targeting objects around opposition. OC observations were conducted during the period between Feb 2015 and Mar 2016, at CTIO in early periods, and at three KMTNet stations (CTIO, SSO and SAAO) since late July 2015, excluding the "bulge season" when the telescope time is exclusively used for exoplanet search. We present the preliminary lightcurves of 66 PHAs and 59 NEAs that we obtained during the OC runs.