What got you started in Kuiper Belt research?
LW: Lowell astronomer Bob Millis had started a program called the Deep Ecliptic Survey with several colleagues. They were looking for Kuiper Belt objects (KBOs) and I joined that group. It took about seven years to find 500 objects — that was the original goal of the project. When the project was first started in 1998 there were only a handful of KBOs known. So, what was out there? The idea was to get a sense of the structure of the Kuiper Belt by looking at patterns in their orbits to see how the belt is structured. Eventually, we got long-term, guaranteed time at the 4-m Mayall Telescope at Kitt Peak and the 4-m Blanco Telescope in Chile at CTIO. SW: Tell us a little more about the work to determine the structure of the Kuiper Belt? LW: Once you have a large enough population of KBOs, you can start classifying them by type. One such type features resonant orbits with Neptune. For example, a 2:3 resonance KBO goes around the sun two times for every three times Neptune orbits the sun.
