KBO encounters Options

[xtruel]

Hi,

I’m regular follower of NH and I’m also interested in the 2nd leg of the mission, i.e the 2016+ KBOs encounters. Does anyone know when operations about this leg (starting with searching objects of interest with HST or some other earth-based means, I suppose) are expected to begin ?

[elakdawalla]

I would assume that all light sources in these images are points of light -- remember that we can't even resolve relatively big Pluto as a disk, so the size of KBO you're looking for wouldn't be resolveable as a disk with even the most powerful of telescopes. They are spread out not because they are disks but because the pointlike light is spread out across the detector a little bit for various reasons.

[centsworth_II]

....the pointlike light is spread out across the detector a little bit for various reasons.

Maybe one reason is the same as explained in your Planetary Society Blog in relation to Deep Impact's exoplanet search?

I sent an email to EPOCh's Principal Investigator, Drake Deming, at Goddard Space Flight Center, to ask him how the search would work. It turns out that he plans to turn Deep Impact's flaw to his benefit....
That's what I call making lemonade from lemons. The camera blur spreads the point-source light from stars out over several pixels on the camera's CCD. Deming explains here how that helps.... "to get high signal to noise, we have to collect lots of photons from the star. That's where the defocus helps. Each pixel of the CCD has a limited capacity to collect photons before it saturates. With a defocused image, we have about 75 pixels collecting light for us, so we can collect lots of photons in each exposure without saturating, and that gives us the high signal-to-noise ratio that we need."

[ugordan]

I think the point sources are not actually points primarily because of two reasons:
1) telescope point spread function
2) atmospheric turbulence averaged out over the exposure duration