Institute for Advanced Study Informal Astrophysics Seminar

The small bodies of the Solar System are a valuable tracer of its present-day structure, its evolution, and ultimately provide clues into the early times of its formation. In the next 5 years, the known sample of all small body populations will grow 10-50x, driven largely by large survey programs. For example, the LSST alone will generate a billion measurements of millions of Solar System objects, with simulations predicting ~100,000 new discoveries of nearby NEOs (Jones et al. 2017), 5.5 million for the main belt, and ~40,000-200,000 for the trans-Neptunian populations (Ivezic et al 2008; Juric et al. 2018). In this talk I will discuss what to expect from this sample, especially in the early years. I'll briefly overview the LSST and ZTF surveys, and what they are expected to discover (and -- in the case of ZTF -- already are). The talk will discuss the techniques to find small bodies in survey datasets, and places where improved algorithms could significantly increase the yields. I will conclude with an overview the science opportunities this new sample is bringing.