Hi all,
I am a professional software developer working on the data processing pipeline for NEO Surveyor (Near Earth Object Surveyor), an infrared space telescope which will launch in late 2027 looking for potentially hazardous asteroids (aka, things which might hit us). As a part of my work, I generate simulations of millions of asteroids positions and calculate what we will expect to observe with NEO Surveyor. As a part of this work I (and a few others) have developed a python package I recently was allowed to open source to the public:
https://github.com/Caltech-IPAC/kete
This is a numerical integrator which can be used to predict the position of asteroids or comets into the future or past (about 100 years is supported). It is not quite as precise as the JPL Horizons service, however it can perform calculations on the entire asteroid belt at once on a laptop computer. It is relatively straightforward to get precision on the 10/100s of milli-arcseconds positional predictions for asteroids.
Two primary examples which I think community would benefit most from are these two:
https://caltech-ipac...ot-elevation-py
https://caltech-ipac...bservability-py
Which predict the observability of objects over time (one is a single night, the other is longer term).
The scope of this project is somewhat limited, basically "where are the known asteroids at a given moment in time, and can we estimate the brightness to some first order approximation". There are no plans to extend features outside of this scope, however if you have a suggestion for something that is within the scope, I am interested in hearing your opinion. If anyone has issues, please feel free to raise an issue on the github issue tab, though I cannot make any promises about fixing them.
I hope someone outside of my project may find some use for these tools!
Happy asteroid hunting.
Edited by ddahlen, 28 October 2024 - 07:34 PM.
