2025-08-03 –, Kuiper Space Sciences Lecture Hall (308)
CATCH is a search tool designed to identify observations of comets and asteroids in wide-field time-domain sky survey data. A driving use case for CATCH is to find observations or significant non-detections of potentially hazardous asteroids in archival data sets. Hosted and maintained by the Planetary Data System's Small Bodies Node, it currently contains 38 million observational data products from twelve different observatories, including surveys such as Spacewatch, Catalina Sky Survey, and ATLAS (Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert Survey). Together there are 12,000 observatory-nights spanning the years 1996 to 2025. We briefly review the methodology of CATCH and its features, then present our recent updates and future plans. For example, in 2025 we updated CATCH to support fixed-target searches, provide a 3D view of the Solar System at the time of the observation, and added the ability to limit searches by date range. Development on CATCH continues, and we will share our progress re-writing the CATCH backend, aimed at reducing typical full-database moving target search times from minutes to tens of seconds, and adding orbital-element-based searches.
Principal Research Scientist, Department of Astronomy, University of Maryland, College Park
My primary research interests are based on the compositions and thermal properties of comets and sometimes asteroids. I am also a staff scientist for the Small Bodies Node of the Planetary Data System.