• Journal of The Korean Astronomical Society
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• v.49 no.1
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• pp.9-18
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• 2016

Euclid, which is primarily a dark-energy/cosmology mission, may have a microlensing component, consisting of perhaps four dedicated one-month campaigns aimed at the Galactic bulge. We show that such a program would yield excellent auxilliary science, including asteroseismology detections for about 100 000 giant stars, and detection of about 1000 Kuiper Belt Objects (KBOs), down to 2-2.5 mag below the observed break in the KBO luminosity function at I ∼ 26. For the 400 KBOs below the break, Euclid will measure accurate orbits, with fractional period errors ≲ 2.5%.

• Journal of The Korean Astronomical Society
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• v.47 no.6
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• pp.279-291
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• 2014

I show that the WFIRST microlensing survey will enable detection and precision orbit determination of Kuiper Belt Objects (KBOs) down to $H_{vega}=28.2$ over an effective area of ${\sim}17deg^2$. Typical fractional period errors will be ${\sim}1.5%{\times}10^{0.4(H-28.2)}$ with similar errors in other parameters for roughly 5000 KBOs. Binary companions to detected KBOs can be detected to even fainter limits, $H_{vega}=29$, corresponding to R~30.5 and effective diameters D~7 km. For KBOs H~23, binary companions can be found with separations down to 10 mas. This will provide an unprecedented probe of orbital resonance and KBO mass measurements. More than a thousand stellar occultations by KBOs can be combined to determine the mean size as a function of KBO magnitude down to H~25. Current ground-based microlensing surveys can make a significant start on finding and characterizing KBOs using existing and soon-to-be-acquired data.

• Journal of The Korean Astronomical Society
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• v.29 no.spc1
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• pp.351-354
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• 1996

In this paper it is explained how most of asteroids can avoid very close approach to Jupiter, to the earth for earth orbit crossing asteroids, and to Neptune for Kuiper-belt asteroids by mechanisms which work also for Neptune-Pluto system. In fact the mutual distance of the planets cannot become very small as the critical argument librates around $180^{\circ}$ because of 2:3 mean motion resonance and the argument of perihelion of Pluto librates around $90^{\circ}$. And it is found that among nearly 40 Kuiper-belt asteroids discovered in recent years $40\%$ have orbits similar to Pluto. For main-belt asteroids the distribution with respect to the semi-major axes has peculiar characteristics and the author tries to explain how their peaks and gaps are created. It is also found that $30\%$ of 80 earth orbit crossing asteroids which have minimum perihelion distances less than 1.04AU have no chance to collide with the earth. Still $30\%$ of them have a few probability to collide with the earth as they have dynamical characteristics of short-periodic comets.

• Bulletin of the Korean Space Science Society
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• 2003.05b
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• pp.60-60
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• 2003

No Abstract, See Full Text

• Journal of The Korean Astronomical Society
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• v.49 no.4
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• pp.123-126
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• 2016

Microlensing is generally thought to probe planetary systems only out to a few Einstein radii. Microlensing events generated by bound planets beyond about 10 Einstein radii generally do not yield any trace of their hosts, and so would be classified as free floating planets (FFPs). I show that it is already possible, using adaptive optics (AO), to constrain the presence of potential hosts to FFP candidates at separations comparable to the Oort Cloud. With next-generation telescopes, planets at Kuiper-Belt separations can be probed. Next generation telescopes will also permit routine vetting for all FFP candidates, simply by obtaining second epochs 4-8 years after the event. At present, the search for such hosts is restricted to within the "confusion limit" of θ_confus ∼ 0.25′′, but future WFIRST (Wide Field Infrared Survey Telescope) observations will allow one to probe beyond this confusion limit as well.

• The Bulletin of The Korean Astronomical Society
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• v.28 no.1
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• pp.88-88
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• 2003

• The Bulletin of The Korean Astronomical Society
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• v.28 no.1
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• pp.89-89
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• 2003

• The Bulletin of The Korean Astronomical Society
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• v.38 no.1
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• pp.62.2-62.2
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• 2013

It is considered that comets near the ecliptic plane have been injected into inner solar system from Kuiper-belt. Some of them are still active while others are dormant with no detectable tails and comae. These dormant comets have eccentric and/or inclined orbits, which are parameterized by Tisserand parameter TJ<3. In addition, dormant comets can be differentiated from asteroids based on the albedo, because they have low albedo (the geometrical albedos pv<0.1). The conditions of TJ<3 and pv<0.1 have been used as a criteria to discriminate dormant comets from asteroids. However, we must be more careful because there are 'contaminations' from the outer region, i.e. Jovian Trojans (5.05

• The Bulletin of The Korean Astronomical Society
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• v.43 no.1
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• pp.48.2-48.2
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• 2018

SPHEREx is expected to provide us with the opportunity of unbiased sampling of small Solar System objects along with near-infrared ($0.75-5.0{\mu}m$) spectroscopic (R ~ 41) information. The estimated numbers of detections are tens of thousands for asteroids, thousands for Trojans, hundreds for comets, and several for Kuiper Belt Objects, Centaurs and Scattered Disk Objects. Wide spectral range covering many bands from carbon-bearing molecules and ices will enable us to systematically survey the volatile materials throughout the Solar System. SPHEREx will, for the first time, produce the near-infrared spectral map of the zodiacal light to pin-down the relative contributions of various populations of Solar System objects and interstellar dust to the dust grains in the interplanetary space. The study of the zodiacal light is also important to remove the foreground for the EBL (extragalactic background light) study, one of the main topics of the mission.

• The Bulletin of The Korean Astronomical Society
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• v.36 no.2
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• pp.129.1-129.1
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• 2011

We have applied an advanced multi-aperture indexing photometry and sophisticated de-trending method to existing Taiwanese-American Occultation Survey (TAOS) data sets. TAOS, a wide-field ($3^{\circ}{\times}3^{\circ}$) and rapid photometry (5Hz) survey, is designed to detect small objects in the Kuiper Belt. Since TAOS has fast and multiple exposures per zipper mode image, point spread function (PSF) varies in a given image. Selecting appropriate aperture among various size apertures allows us to reflect these variations in each light curve. The survey data turned out to contain various trends such as telescope vibration, CCD noise, and unstable local weather. We select multiple sets of stars using a hierarchical clustering algorithm in such a way that the light curves in each cluster show strong correlations between them. We then determine a primary trend (PT) per cluster using a weighted sum of the normalized light curves, and we use the constructed PTs to remove trends in individual light curves. After removing the trend, we can get each synthetic light curve of star that has much higher signal-to-noise ratio. We compare the efficiency of the synthetic light curves with the efficiency of light curves made by previous existing photometry pipelines. Our photometric method is able to restore subtle brightness variation that tends to be missed in conventional aperture photometric methods, and can be applied to other wide-field surveys suffering from PSF variations and trends. We are developing an analysis package for the next generation TAOS survey (TAOS II) based on the current experiments.