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Whipple: Exploring the Solar System beyond Neptune Using a Survey for Occultations of Bright Stars
Panel Selection:
Primitive Bodies: Asteroids, comets, Phobos, Deimos, Pluto/Charon and other Kuiper belt objects, meteorites, and interplanetary dust.
Institution:
Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics
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.