Whipple

Whipple was a proposed space observatory in the NASA Discovery Program. The observatory would try to search for objects in the Kuiper belt and the theorized Oort cloud by conducting blind occultation observations. Although the Oort cloud was hypothesized in the 1950s, it has not yet been directly observed. The mission would attempt to detect Oort cloud objects by scanning for brief moments where the objects would block the light of background stars. In 2011, three finalists were selected for the 2016 Discovery Program, and Whipple was not among them, but it was awarded funding to continue its technological development efforts.

Observatory data from Wikidata (CC0). Summary from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA).