The Design of a Novel Survey for Small Objects in the Solar System

We evaluated several concepts for a new survey for small objects in the Solar System. We designed a highly novel survey for comets in the outer region of the Solar System, which exploits the occultations of relatively bright stars to infer the presence of otherwise extremely faint objects. The populations and distributions of these objects are not known; the uncertainties span orders of magnitude! These objects are important scientifically as probes of the primordial solar system, and programmatically now that major investments may be made in the possible mitigation of the hazard of asteroid or comet collisions with the Earth.