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In terms of scientific output, the best way to study solar system bodies issending spacecraft to make in-situ measurements or to observe at closedistance. Probably, the second best means to learn about important physicalproperties of solar system objects is through stellar occultations. Bycombining occultation observations from several sites, size and shape can bederived with kilometric accuracy. Also, atmospheric properties can be derivedif the body has an atmosphere. Furthermore, the technique can detect rings andeven satellites (although rarely) around the main body. Except for the veryspecial cases of Pluto and Charon, stellar occultations by TransneptunianObjects (TNOs) had never been observed until October 2009. This was because theephemeris of the TNOs have much larger uncertainties than their angulardiameters (typically of the order of ~10 milliarcsecond) and also becausestellar catalogs were not accurate to the milliarcsecond level. Despite thedifficulties, at the time of this writing, 43 occultations by 22 differentTrans-Neptunian Objects, and 17 occultations by 5 Centaurs have been detectedthanks to the efforts of several teams. Due to the complications of accuratelypredicting and observing these events, most of the successes have been achievedthrough wide international collaboration, which is a key issue to succeed inobserving stellar occultations by TNOs. Multichord occultations are typicallydetected at a rate of ~3 per year on average, whereas the majority of theobserved occultations are single-chord detections, which means that only onesite detects the occultation. In these cases, no tight constraints on size andshape can be derived from those observations alone. Here we review most of theaspects involved in the complex process to successfully observe occultations,and present some of the lessons learned.

Stellar Occultations by Transneptunian objects: from Predictions to Observations and Prospects for the Future