Newsletter - April 2023
2023 APRIL 01
In this month’s issue:
Summary WAMO
New “data” subdomain
NEOCP removal
What’s New.
1. Summary of Where Are My Observations page (WAMO)
We are pleased to announce the first beta version of a new tool: the Summary WAMO page or SWAMO.
The SWAMO page is meant to give an overview of the processing-outcome for all observations submitted from each observatory in our observatory list over time. The page features two dashboards:
SWAMO
SWAMO-R (SWAMO-Recent)
The SWAMO dashboard lets you explore the outcomes of all submissions received by the Minor Planet Center, at a month-level granularity. The SWAMO-R dashboard lets you explore the outcomes of the past six months of submissions at a day-level granularity.
The SWAMO data is updated weekly, and the SWAMO-R data is updated every day. The raw data is also available for all the submissions and for the more recent ones.
For more information on the page itself, please refer to the about page.
We welcome all feedback and suggestions from the community through our JIRA Helpdesk.
2. New “data” subdomain
The SWAMO webpage is the first software to be hosted by a new subdomain called data.minorplanetcenter.net. As part of our long-term goals, we are planning to migrate our web services to Amazon Web Services (AWS). The first step towards this was to establish a Docker-based infrastructure on a new server for hosting web content. To make this infrastructure visible, we added the “data” subdomain to the website. All of the beta versions of new software we are developing will be hosted by data.minorplanetcenter.net until we gather community feedback and we deploy a fully operational version.
3. NEOCP Removal
Rules
We have added documentation of our rules for the removal of objects from the NEOCP. All the information can be found at this link. We also remind users that the disposition of NEOCP objects at the time of removal can be found on the Previous NEO Confirmation page.
Minor Planet Electronic Circular (MPEC) automation
When there is sufficient astrometry to determine a well-constrained orbit for an NEOCP object, and the object is believed to be new, if the object is either an NEO or a distant object (q > 5.6 AU), the discovery is announced in an MPEC. In most cases, NEOCP objects are designated and an MPEC is issued (if applicable) manually. However, in recent months we have been working on an automated script that is able to automatically handle any ‘easy’ cases. This script runs several times per day and will only designate an NEOCP object if it meets a very large number of conditions that are explained in the following link Removal of Objects. The pie chart below shows some of the conditions that are checked by the script and the percentage of the objects that have been designated (success).
If an object does not meet the criteria, it will be manually processed by MPC staff.
From September 01, 2022 at 15:00 UTC to Mar 28, 2023 at 23:00 UTC, the script has automatically designated (with absolutely no manual intervention) 65 non-NEOs and it has automatically designated and published an MPEC for 80 NEOs.
What’s New?
This section includes major highlights from the past months and some new developments that will be available very soon, at least in beta versions.
WAMO
WAMO is a tool that is very appreciated by the community. We have developed it to provide users with information regarding the status of their observations (e.g. if they have been published, deleted, or if they are awaiting processing). Users have recently discovered some vulnerabilities of the WAMO tool that would allow them to search for unpublished astrometry that they have not submitted. To avoid this problem, we have decided to slightly change the WAMO output for unpublished astrometry. The new output will show the initial string used for the search (e.g. obs80, obsID or trksub) in addition to the processing queue that is currently handling the observations. In case of published observations, the output will remain as it was before.
Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs)
As of MPEC 2023-D40 (February 21, 2023), Datacite DOIs are available for all new MPECs. The first published DOI is available here.
NASA ADS, based here in Cambridge (MA) at the Center for Astrophysics, is in the process of mining the relevant data from Datacite, so that MPECs will be available on their system soon. This will allow all our users to cite their observations in scientific articles or proposals, which we know has been an outstanding request from the community. We are also in the process of creating DOIs for all the MPECs that have been released before February 21.
Status Page
We have a new Status Page. The page highlights important information about MPC operations and systems. We have also updated our history of previous statuses. The link to the pages can be found at the bottom of the new Status Page. Please let us know if you see any issues.
Digest2 code
We have recently fixed a couple of bugs that had been reported through the Jira Helpdesk.
The URL that digest2 used to automatically fetch observatory codes was old and it resulted in digest2.obscodes containing the wrong html text. We have updated the URL.
Running digest2 with the -o and -m flags but not specifying any input astrometry files resulted in:
digest2 overwriting digest2.obscodes with incorrect data;
digest2 overwriting the file used as population model and specified with the -m flag.
We have fixed the code so that it will not overwrite any of the files. If you want to create new files, you will have to remove the old ones.
We thus recommend that you:
Download the latest copy of the repo from https://bitbucket.org/mpcdev/digest2/src/master/
Download the latest copy of the population model from the “downloads" section https://bitbucket.org/mpcdev/digest2/downloads/
Recreate the model file (digest2.model) with the downloaded csv.
Please also check that the observatory file that you are using is the correct one.
Please let us know if you have any questions or if there are any further issues.
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