DEEP Drilling into the Kuiper Belt: First Results from the DECam Ecliptic Exploration Project

The DECam Ecliptic Exploration Project (DEEP) is a NOAO/NOIRLab survey program that has been awarded 47.5 nights on the 4-meter Blanco telescope at CTIO to carry out a deep-drilling search for trans-Neptunian Objects (TNOs) in a set of fields distributed along the invariable plane. In this talk I will describe the survey design and demonstrate how our shift-and-stack pipeline efficiently recovers TNOs to a limiting magnitude of V~26.5 to distances beyond 100 au. I will present preliminary results for the absolute magnitude, inclination, and barycentric distance at discovery for objects detected in the first three years of survey data over an initial area of approximately 9 sq. deg. This work is supported by the NSF and NASA.