We present a detailed study of the observational biases of the DECam Ecliptic Exploration Project's (DEEP) B1 data release and survey simulation software that enables direct statistical comparisons between models and our data. We inject a synthetic population of objects into the images, and then subsequently recover them in the same processing as our real detections. This enables us to characterize the survey's completeness as a function of apparent magnitudes and on-sky rates of motion. We study the statistically optimal functional form for the magnitude, and develop a methodology that can estimate the magnitude and rate efficiencies for all survey's pointing groups simultaneously. We have determined that our peak completeness is on average 80\% in each pointing group, and our magnitude drops to 25% of this value at m25=26.22. We describe the freely available survey simulation software and its methodology. We conclude by using it to infer that our effective search area for objects at 40 au is 14.8deg2, and that our lack of dynamically cold distant objects means that there at most 8×103 objects with 60<a<80 au and absolute magnitudes H≤8.
@article{arxiv.2310.03671,
title = {The DECam Ecliptic Exploration Project (DEEP) III: Survey characterization and simulation methods},
author = {Pedro H. Bernardinelli and Hayden Smotherman and Zachary Langford and Stephen K. N. Portillo and Andrew J. Connolly and J. Bryce Kalmbach and Steven Stetzler and Mario Juric and William J. Oldroyd and Hsing Wen Lin and Fred C. Adams and Colin Orion Chandler and Cesar Fuentes and David W. Gerdes and Matthew J. Holman and Larissa Markwardt and Andrew McNeill and Michael Mommert and Kevin J. Napier and Matthew J. Payne and Darin Ragozzine and Andrew S. Rivkin and Hilke Schlichting and Scott S. Sheppard and Ryder Strauss and David E. Trilling and Chadwick A. Trujillo},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2310.03671},
year = {2023}
}