Show HN: precision asteroid orbital dynamics library

7 points

9 months ago

This is a Python (with Rust backend) library for high accuracy orbit calculation of the entire known catalog of asteroids. It is a full N-Body integrator, including lots of additional physics, such as relativistic effects, non-spherical gravitational fields of planets, masses of large asteroids, and a number of non-gravitational forces such as radiation pressure. The design goal is essentially JPL Horizons on your laptop, but all asteroids at once.

I began this project while I worked at Caltech on a NASA mission called NEO Surveyor (which is a space telescope designed to survey Near Earth Objects). It is being used by NEO Surveyor to predict previously known asteroids in images to reduce processing costs (since it is computationally expensive to process unknown asteroids). I wrote this generally enough that it is also being used by the SPHEREx and Roman space telescopes for a similar purpose.

I got it open sourced before I left caltech for a PhD, and I am continuing to develop it as a part of my PhD.

Here is a plot of my favorite group of asteroids, the Hildas, because of Jupiter their orbits are synchronized such that they make a triangle:

https://dahlend.github.io/kete/auto_examples/plot_mpc_state....