2023-11-08 –, Talks
We present the Comet–Asteroid Telescopic Catalog Hunter (CATCH), a data archive search tool currently deployed at The NASA Planetary Data System Small Bodies Node. The Small Bodies Node is the main data archive for NASA's near-Earth objects, such as the Catalina Sky Survey data archive (Seaman et al. 2022). These are large data sets, totaling hundreds of terabytes in volume, making them difficult for most researchers to work with. To better serve the research community, we developed the CATCH tool to search these archives for potential observations of solar system small bodies. It works by identifying the intersection between a surveyed portion of the sky at a given time, and the trajectory of an object computed from its ephemerides. A core part of CATCH's architecture is the use of Google's open-source 'S2 library' to perform spatial-indexing on these data sets using a one-dimensional, space-filling Hilbert curve. Metadata for matched data products are presented to the user, and image cutouts around the ephemeris positions are presented. We believe that this tool/technique has great potential for other survey archives.
Dr Darg is a member of the PDS Small Bodies Node at the University of Maryland, where he mostly writes software and dev-ops operations in support of the group's research. He has a DPhil in Astrophysics from Oxford University, and has held postgraduate positions at Oxford and Johns Hopkins University.