Dr. Katherine Volk

I think for the asteroid surveys, it's essentially fully automated for the most part.

But Kuiper Belt things, you tend to have to push it a lot closer to the noise level to see these things.

So there's a lot of false positives.

This animation is from a colleague of mine, Michelle Bannister.

We work on an outer solar system origin survey.

And she had to blink through an ungodly number of images and candidate objects to pick out the ones that were real.

But this is a real one.

This is three images taken over a span of about two hours.

Each image exposure is about two minutes.

It's much longer than you would do for an asteroid survey.

And of course, in the last frame, there is an interloper, what she refers to as vermin of the sky interfering with our survey.

There's an asteroid there, and it's smeared out because it's moving appreciably during our two-minute exposure time.

And so I really like this because it shows this is about how far our Kuiper Belt object moved over the two hours that we were doing this discovery imaging.

And the asteroid moved, you know,

that distance in only two minutes of the exposure time and is nowhere to be seen in the other images.

So it gives you a sense of why asteroids are considerably easier to detect than Kuiper belt objects.

One other thing that you have to do with Kuiper belt objects and other outer solar system things is you have to spend more time tracking them to figure out what kind of orbit they're on.

So it's not enough to just know that something's out there.

We want to know what's its orbit, what part of the Kuiper Belt is it a member of.

And that requires really nailing down its position and velocities that we can do an orbit fit.