The International Research Fellowship Program enables U.S. scientists and engineers to conduct three to twenty-four months of research abroad. The program's awards provide opportunities for joint research, and the use of unique or complementary facilities, expertise and experimental conditions abroad.
This award will support a twenty-four month research fellowship by Dr. Rhiannon Lynne Allen to work with Dr. Brett Gladman at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, British Columbia. Support for this project is provided by the Mathematics and Physical Sciences Directorate's Office of Multidisciplinary Activities.
The Kuiper Belt is the population of primitive bodies found between 30 and 100 AU from the Sun. As a large remnant planetesimal population, the Kuiper Belt provides a unique opportunity to study planet formation. A record of the history of the outer Solar System is written in the dynamical distribution of Kuiper Belt Objects (KBOs). Studying their physical characteristics, size distribution and volume density provides valuable constraints for planetesimal accretion and collision evolution models. The PI proposes a three part observing program to expand the present understanding of the Kuiper Belt: (1) a wide field, shallow survey to provide a large sample of KBO's, (2) a smaller scale, deep survey to place limits on the density of the smallest KBO's and the distant Kuiper Belt and (3) individual observations to obtain lightcurves and color photometry for a range of KBO's to explore physical properties of KBO's.
Dr. Gladman has organized an international collaboration to conduct a wide field survey of the Kuiper Belt using the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope (CFHT) and the Megaprime Camera, which has a 1 square degree field of view.
