Photometry of Kuiper Belt objects with the ESO Large Program

An ESO Large Program for the study of the physical properties of Trans-Neptunian Objects and Centaurs started in April 2001 on the 8m Very Large Telescopes, and will proceed until March 2003. This project aims at providing a large number of spectrophotometric measurements of Kuiper Belt Objects at Visible and Near-IR wavelengths, in order to investigate their physical properties and to start a taxonomic classification. We present here the first results of the photometric part of the program: visible (BVRI) colors for ~30 objects and Near-IR (JHK) colors of ~10 objects. We then discuss the results of statistical analysis and the existence of trends in a dataset that encompasses published colors by March 2002 (~80 objects)