DEEP-South: The Progress Report

Deep Ecliptic Patrol of the Southern Sky (DEEP-South) observation is being made during the off-season for exoplanet survey, using Korea Microlensing Telescope Network (KMTNet). An optimal combination of its prime focus optics and the 0.3 billion pixel CCD provides a four square degrees field of view with 0.4 arcsec/pixel plate scale which is also best suited for small body studies. Normal operation of KMTNet started in October 2015, and a significant portion of the allocated telescope time for DEEP-South is dedicated to targeted observation, Opposition Census (OC), of near-Earth asteroids for physical and taxonomic characterization. This is effectively achieved through multiband, time series photometry using Johnson-Cousins BVRI filters. Uninterrupted monitoring of the southern sky with KMTNet is optimized for spin characterization of a broad spectrum of asteroids ranging from the near-Earth space to the main-belt, including binaries, asteroids with satellites, slow/fast- and non-principal axis-rotators, and thus is expected to facilitate the debiasing of previously reported lightcurve observations. Our software subsystem consists of an automated observation scheduler, a pipelined data processing system for differential photometry, and an easy-to-use lightcurve analysis toolkit. Lightcurves, spin periods and provisional determination of class of asteroids to which the lightcurve belongs will be presented, using the dataset from first year operation of KMTNet. Our new taxonomic classification scheme for asteroids will also be summarized.