Invited Presentation

The status of Transneptunian Automated Occultation Survey (TAOS II)

Shiang-Yu Wang (ASIAA)

The Transneptunian Automated Occultation Survey is the second generation of TAOS project which aims to detect the stellar occultations generated by small outer solar system bodies. The small bodies (with diameter smaller than 20km) beyond Neptune are so small that they could not be directly imaged by any of the existing telescope.
TAOS II will build upon the successful operation of a precursor survey, TAOS I. The survey will operate three 1.3m telescopes at the Observatorio Astronomico Nacional (OAN) at San Pedro Mártir (SPM) in Baja California, México. Each telescope will be equipped with a custom high-speed camera capable of collecting image data on more that 10,000 stars at a readout cadence of 20 Hz. The resulting data volume will be enormous, with over 300 terabytes per year of raw image data.
The status of the site development, telescopes and cameras as well as the prospective of the project will be presented in the talk.