Simulating the Performance of the Whipple Space Survey of the Outer Solar System

Computer Science – Performance

Scientific paper

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Scientific paper

Whipple is a proposed Discovery-class mission that will explore the outer Solar System be searching for serendipitous occultations of stars by small bodies. Whipple will test fundamental predictions of the theories of the origin and evolution of the solar system by studying directly the populations of small objects that lie beyond the orbit of Neptune, including the Kuiper Belt and scattered disk, the region surrounding Sedna, and the Oort Cloud.
Whipple will employ a Schmidt-Cassegrain optical design with a 77 cm aperture, imaging onto a focal plane of 37 square degrees. The focal plane will comprise nine CMOS devices that can produce high signal-to-noise photometric light curves for stars at a variety of cadences: 10,000 stars at 40 Hz, 20,000 stars at 20 Hz, or 40,000 stars at 10 Hz.
We have developed a series of tools that simulate stellar populations, occultation light curves (including noise), onboard detection and our fitting routines. We describe all the routines and the simulation pipeline as well as details of the detection algorithms, including statistical arguments. Results of expected rates for different model populations are also presented, demonstrating the anticipated performance and event yield for the mission. These simulations show how Whipple will measure size distributions as a function of (three dimensional) position for these populations.

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