Dr Scott Sheppard
https://carnegiescience.edu/dr-scott-s-sheppard-2
The Search for Planet X
The Kuiper Belt, where Pluto lives, is a region of comet-like objects just beyond Neptune. This belt of objects has an outer edge, which we are only now able to explore in detail. For the past few years, astronomer Scott Sheppard and his colleagues have been performing the largest and deepest survey ever attempted to search for distant Solar System objects.
https://www.ifa.hawaii.edu/2021/08/fastest-asteroid-around-the-sun-discovered/
Team leader Scott S. Sheppard, an IfA graduate now at the Carnegie Institution for Science, discovered the asteroid in images taken on August 13, during evening twilight near the Sun, using the Dark Energy Camera (DECam) on the Victor M. Blanco 4-meter Telescope at Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory (CTIO), a program of NSF’s NOIRLab in Chile. Astronomers from Brown University, Ian Dell’antonio and Shenming Fu, were using DECam for an unrelated science program. In collaboration with Sheppard, they went from studying some of the most distant objects in our universe to some of the closest, using the first few minutes of twilight to take images near the Sun. Sheppard was able to look through the images within hours to find the asteroid, named 2021 PH27, peeking through twilight. As the Sun sets in the sky, this twilight time is the only efficient way to look for asteroids interior to Earth’s orbit that are near Mercury and Venus.