Assigned ID: 209 ----- Attempting Submission 1 (Thu Feb 25 23:20:44 GMT 2010) ----- HST Phase I Proposal 209 (KBO_Proposal.apt) successfully submitted. ----- Attempting Submission 2 (Fri Feb 26 20:43:48 GMT 2010) ----- The study of the size distribution of small, sub-km-sized Kuiper belt objects (KBOs) provides fundamental constraints on their material properties, their collisional evolution and the formation of debris disks. Sub-km-sized Kuiper belt objects elude direct detection, but the signature of their occultations of background stars is detectable. The first sub-km-sized KBO has been reported recently by Schlichting et al. (2009), who analyzed about 40,000 star hours of archival data taken by the Fine Guidance Sensors (FGS) on board the Hubble Space Telescope (HST). This work provides the first measurement of the abundance of hectometer-sized KBOs. This new archival proposal builds and on our initial work and expands it to include: (I) The analysis of the remaining FGS data, which will more than triple the number of star hours. (II) Further development of the detection algorithm, allowing the search for more impact parameters and including the actual angular sizes of the star (III) A faster method of calculating the significance of candidate events, allowing more precise significant estimates separately for each orbit data. (IV) The creation of an open database that will contain all FGS data. This work will therefore go deeper than the original one, and together with more than tripling the number of star hours the new survey will be about 5 times more powerful. It holds the promise for additional detections of KBO occultations and will shed light onto the material properties and collisional evolution of sub-km-sized KBOs.

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