Occultation Astronomy

Extract

The era of occultation astronomy, studying dark objects by observing occultations of bright ones, has begun. The paper of Duncan, Quinn and Tremarne, “The Origin of Short-Period Comets”, Astrophys. J. Letters, 328, 69-73 (1988), greatly improved the prospects for occultation astronomy by demonstrating the existence of a second comet reservoir, the Kuiper Belt, much closer to us than the Oort Cloud and concentrated toward the ecliptic plane. Charles Alcock at Livermore (private communication) has begun work on a practical system of small telescopes to observe occultations of stars by comets. I here propose a system similar in concept of Alcock’s but using different hardware. We need to try various systems on a small scale to find out which are most cost-effective. My proposal is based on the Multiple Telescope Robotic Observatory (MTRO) developed by Boyd and Genet at Fairborn Observatory in Arizona. See Russell M. Genet, “Multiple-Telescope Robotic Observatories in Space”, submitted to P.A.S.P. (1990).