Scope of the workshop
The wide-field (1.5 deg2) Hyper Suprime-Cam (HSC) on the Subaru 8-meter telescope today provides the premier instrumentation available for survey observation of faint solar system bodies. Subaru HSC can detect very faint (for example r' > 25) solar system objects with the 90-sec exposure. However, so far, Subaru + HSC have not conducted a comprehensive survey of small solar system bodies. We would propose a workshop to prepare a proposal for a faint solar system object survey under Subaru international collaboration.
The background of this workshop proposal is that the observing cadence of the current Subaru strategic program HSC survey (HSC-SSP survey), which is using 300 nights of Subaru telescope and survey about 1400 deg2 during 5 years with 5 broad bands, is not optimized for solar system science, limiting the scientific output of the survey in solar system study. Moreover, the membership of the HSC-SSP survey is limited in Japan, Taiwan and Princeton Univ., which are investors and developers of the HSC. Therefore, we propose to remove the border of the membership of the HSC-SSP survey and establish a "NEW" HSC survey, which is optimized for a detection of small solar system bodies. With many new detections of solar system objects from the "NEW" HSC survey, varieties of solar system science and follow up observation can be executed with our international collaboration.
Fortunately, the organizers of this workshop have been heavily involved in the Solar System science team for the HSC-SSP survey and/or the Outer Solar Systems Origin Survey (OSSOS) that was a extremely successful CFHT large program in 2013 - 2016, having detected and classified more than 1000 TNOs down to a limiting magnitude of r = 24.5. So, with their experience, organizers will provide a survey cadence and discuss it with participants in this workshop.
The main goal of the workshop is to formulate a plan to prepare a Subaru Large/Intensive Program proposal to search for faint (r' = 25-26) solar system objects. The discussions will include:
- Science goals for such a survey (including all families of small bodies in the solar system such as TNOs, trojans, centaurs, etc.),
- Technical issues such as observing cadence, object detection, and orbital classification,
- Organization of the proposal team.
We are inviting people from current and potential Subaru partner countries to join us in this endeavor. In particular, it is very likely that the East Asia Observatory (EAO) will become a partner of Subaru. As such, both Japan and EAO will devote a significant number of nights to "shared time" among the Subaru partners for collaborative proposals. Having collaborators from all of the EAO partner countries involved with this proposal will improve our chances for success.