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Title: Whipple: Exploring the Solar System beyond Neptune Using a Survey for Occultations of Bright Stars
Primary Author: Charles Alcock
Secondary Author(s): Matthew Holman, Matthew Lehner, Stephen Murray, Pavlos Protopapas, Michael Werner
Institution: Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics
Summary: Whipple is a Discovery class mission to explore the outer Solar System. A small telescope will compile lightcurves of ~40,000 stars sampled at 40 Hz. Small bodies from the Kuiper Belt to the Oort Cloud will occult targeted stars, revealing their distances, sizes, and abundances.
Panel Selection: Primitive Bodies: Asteroids, comets, Phobos, Deimos, Pluto/Charon and other Kuiper belt objects, meteorites, and interplanetary dust.
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These documents have been prepared in coordination with the National Academies of Science in support of the National Academies Planetary Science Decadal Survey. These documents are being made available for information purposes only, and any views and opinions expressed herein do not necessarily state or reflect those of NASA, JPL, or the California Institute of Technology.