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The OSSOS Wiki
(O)uter (S)olar (S)ystem (O)rigins (S)urvey
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Field Layout
OSSOS will be a four-year project beginning spring 2013 (first observations probably in March), operating on the Megaprime CCD mosaic (1x1 degrees) on the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope. The discovery and tracking of essentially all the detected targets over two oppositions of observation (actually about 16 months of arc) will occur on this telescope. The Core Team is in charge of programming observations, reducing the acquired data, detecting objects in a precisely measured way, and providing the various Topic Teams with the data that they require. For some Topic Team science goals, the data from the core team is all they need to pursue their goals, but for other topic teams additional telescope time at other facilities will be required. (It will be very hard to get CFHT time for such projects in the 2013-2016 period.)
The project will be surveying two sets of fields, spring and fall (see the OSSOSurveyDraft, not yet posted). In each season a 7x3 block of fields will be positioned near the ecliptic plane and a second group of fields will be positioned off the plane (see side figures). Each set of fields will be observed repeatedly through-out the semester, and then again the following year to obtain a high-precision orbits on all KBOs detected in the field. A heavily-overlapping set of imaging should allow an extremely precise internal astrometric (and relative photometric) solution in each patch.
Topic Teams
The OSSOS project is divided into topic-teams that are each responsible for ensuring that a particular aspect of the survey science is fully exploited. At the start of the survey each member of the project has been placed into two topic teams, based on their science interests as stated at the start of the survey. By joining a topic team the science team member is committing to helping in this area of science exploitation. Each team selects one of the team members to be the coordinator/lead who will act as an information conduit back to the survey and keep the topic team focussed and organized.
Core : Detection, orbit linkage
Surfaces : Colours, NIR spectra
Light curves : Time variable TNOs, phase curves
Binaries: mutual orbits, separation, colours
Occultations: Predictions, observing campaigns
Size Distributions : H-mag distributions, dependence on class
Resonant Populations : relative populations, libration amplitude distributions
Scattering : Centaurs, Scattering Disk, Oort cloud connection
Catalog mining : Very distant, non-moving object variation (eg. variable stars)
Getting started
Link to the previous CFEPS survey
