DEEP-South: Lightcurves of Near Earth Asteroids from Year One Operations

  • Published : 2016.10.12

Abstract

Deep Ecliptic Patrol of the Southern Sky (DEEP-South) observations have been conducted officially during the off-season for exoplanet search since October 2015. Most of the allocated time for DEEP-South is devoted to targeted photometry, Opposition Census (OC), of Near Earth Asteroids (NEAs) to increase the number of such objects with known physical properties. It is efficiently achieved by multiband, time series photometry. This Opposition Census (OC) mode target objects near their opposition, with km-sized PHAs in the early stage and goes down to sub-km objects. Continuous monitoring of the sky with KMTNet is optimized for spin characterization of various kinds of asteroids, including binaries, satellites, slow/fast- and non-principal axis-rotators, and hence is expected to facilitate the debiasing of previously reported lightcurve observations. We present the preliminary lightcurves of NEAs from year one of the DEEP-South with our long term plan.

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