Welcome to the

Canada-France Ecliptic Plane Survey

 

Started in 2003, the CFEPS project has surveyed approximately 400 square degrees of sky lying within a few degrees of the ecliptic.  This survey resulted in approximately 200 KBOs being discovered.  More significantly, through the  investment of hundreds of hours of follow-up resources (approximately 5-times those used in the discovery phase of the survey) resulted in the determination of high-precision orbits for approximately 80% of the KBOs in the characterized CFEPS sample.  These reliable obits are essential to the scientific exploitation of the CFEPS KBO orbit sample statistics.


The High-Lat Survey  

In 2006 the CFEPS team began a survey of fields whose ecliptic latitudes range between +10 and +60 degrees ecliptic latitude; to-date approximately 600 square degrees have been covered by this high-latitude component of the CFEPS project, resulting in the discovery of 21 high-inclination KBOs whose orbital properties have a distribution that is distinct from the 'on-ecliptic' portion of the CFEPS survey.

Observing Strategy

The CFEPS project acquires survey discovery imaging using the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope's MEGAPRIME camera to enable the surveying of the large areas of sky required to discover new KBOs.

More critical however is the investment of nearly five times the telescope resources in follow-up. To be scientifically useful the orbital properties of the KBO must be well determined and the discovery circumstances well characterized. <more>

L3 - Orbit Distribution and Survey Simulator

KBOs discovered by the CFEPS project in 2003 are given the designation 'L3'. After many years of patient tracking, coupled with the CFEPS survey simulator, the L3 orbit distribution can now be used to determining the intrinsic distribution of material in the Kuiper belt. Based on this orbit catalogue of approximately 60 tracked, classified and characterized objects we can now provide the first ever parametric model of the intrinsic orbit distribution of the classical Kuiper belt.

CFEPS:

  1. (1)an optical imaging survey designed to efficiently and effectively map the orbital structure of the outer solar system. 

  2. (2)a collaboration between astronomers in Canada, France, the United States, Taiwan and Spain