2025 JULY 31

In this month’s issue:

1. Singletons and Archival submission Committee (SARC)
2. Towards a new approach to program codes
3. New extended packed provisional designation
4. New MPEC API
5. Brian Burt
6. Jorge A. Pérez Hernández
7. Meetings

1. Singletons and Archival submission Committee (SARC)

One year ago, in our June 2024 Newsletter, we introduced for the first time the new Singletons and Archival submission Committee (SARC). The goal of the committee was to help the MPC review some specific submissions, especially singletons or archival observations in high profile cases, such as 2024 YR4 or 3I/ATLAS.

We have now created a new webpage in our Documentation section explaining the goal of the committee.

The initial committee consists of six members:

• Tyler Linder, chair of the committee
• Larry Denneau from ATLAS
• Joe Masiero from WISE/NEOWISE and NEO Surveyor
• Rob Weryk from PanSTARRS
• David Rankin from Catalina Sky Survey
• Marco Micheli from the ESA NEO Coordination Centre

Additional experts can always be added on a case-by-case basis.

The committee and the peer-review process will only provide recommendations to the MPC: the MPC will always have the ultimate decision.

Up until now, the committee has been called to express their opinion on a few different submissions of archival observations, but in the near future the committee will be more involved in how the MPC will plan to assign (or re-assign) program codes. For further information, please see our program codes documentation page.

2. Towards a New Approach to Program Codes

The Minor Planet Center (MPC) has historically used program codes to identify different observers observing from the same telescope (see our program codes page for further documentation).

The MPC continuously monitors the astrometric quality of all submitted observations. In particular, we perform a careful verification of the astrometry provided by users requesting a new observatory code before assigning it (see these instructions for further documentation).

Program-code assignments, on the other hand, have not been subject to the same scrutiny, until now.

To start, as of Monday August 4th, a program code will be assigned by default to all new observatory codes.

In addition to that, we are also in the process of refining how program codes are assigned for the submission of archival observations and non-historical stations. More details will come in the next newsletter.

Starting with the submission of archival data, everyone who wishes to submit observations from public archives will need to go through a verification process. The purpose of this change in policy is to try to ensure consistently that high standards of astrometric and photometric measurement are adopted by the community in an era when archival data is becoming increasingly easy to access.

Once users have been confirmed to have satisfied the required training standards, they will be assigned a program code (specific to that observatory code), and will be able to freely submit observations from that observatory code's archive. The MPC will apply that program code to all observations from that user.

In our August Newsletter we will describe how the verification process will be organized and we will give further details on the whole process.

A webpage has been created to collect the information on the program code policy adopted by the MPC. The page will be updated every time new information will be available.

3. New extended packed provisional designation

Following what was already presented in our October 2023 and June 2025 Newsletters, the MPC has now designated the first object using the new extended packed provisional designation. The first designated object using the new scheme is 2015 BA620, and its packed provisional designation is _FB0000.

We are planning to designate a few more objects in the next weeks and to publish a new monthly Minor Planet Circular in August to test all downstream services. Some bugs have already been discovered and fixed. We always appreciate your feedback.

4. New MPEC API

The search for MPECs service was originally created to allow our users to search for MPECs by title. The search capabilities have been expanded:

• The 100 most recent MPECs are shown by default; upon searching, a maximum of 1000 MPECs will be returned;
• Currently, it only performs the search using unpacked designations, e.g. ‘2023 BU5’, and not the packed form;
• The MPEC ‘full name’ can also be used in the search, e.g. ‘2023-B174’;
• Partial matches is no longer the default, but can still be performed using a % wildcard, e.g. 202% BU5.
• Consider also: %=% for identifications, Editorial%, or D%2010% for DOUs from 2010;
• Queries are case-insensitive;
• Date stamps returned are in UT.

The backend of this service has also been restructured and now runs from a new API that has been recently released. The documentation is available online. As for all our services, the MPC always encourages the community to use them and to report any issues or feedback using Jira.

5. Introducing (At Last!) Our “Not-So-New” MPC Hire: Brian Burt

In an unforgivable oversight, we never introduced Brian to our users, despite the fact that he joined the MPC in 2023.

Brian enjoys solving problems in the cross-section of astronomy and software.

He has been with the software team at the MPC since 2023 working on modernization and scaling of processes. He earned a M.S. in Applied Physics at Northern Arizona University, where he became interested in developing software to assist with asteroid observations and characterizations.

Brian worked for several years in the MITHNEOS group at MIT developing software for asteroid spectral observations and cataloging. He then spent several years working with 2 start-ups, both in software engineering capacities, before joining the Lowell Observatory MANOS and AstorbDB groups. In the decade he spent at Lowell, Brian contributed significantly to the Lowell Asteroid Database and observing tools.

6. New MPC hire: Jorge A. Pérez Hernández

Jorge joined the MPC in June 2025 as an Astronomer. His research interests include non-gravitational accelerations and high-fidelity orbit determination of near-Earth objects, initial orbit determination, impact monitoring for potentially hazardous asteroids, nonlinear uncertainty quantification, and applications of high-order automatic differentiation to the orbit determination problem.

Jorge received a B.Sc. (Physics) from Morelos State University (Mexico), and M.Sc. (Physics) and PhD (Physics) degrees from Mexico National Autonomous University (UNAM). His PhD dissertation title was "On the Dynamics of Near-Earth Objects: the Yarkovsky Effect for Asteroid Apophis and the Lyapunov Spectrum of Halley’s Comet". During 2021 he was a Researcher for NASA Frontier Development Lab, applying deep learning models to problems in space sciences. From 2023 to 2025, Jorge worked at ESA’s European Space Operations Center as an Interplanetary Flight Dynamics Engineer in Darmstadt (Germany), where he supported science operations for Solar Orbiter, launch operations for Euclid, and optical navigation operations for Hera.

More information about the MPC staff can be found on the MPC website.

7. Meetings

With the goal of maintaining the MPC presence (virtual or in person) at some of the major conferences for planetary science, the MPC team has been very busy in these past weeks attending multiple meetings:

• Rubin Community Workshop 2025, Tucson
• ADASSx 2025 and Catalina Sky Survey Monsoon Workshop 2025, Tucson
• IAU Symposium 401, “Advancing Reference Systems, Ephemeris, and Standards”, “From the Earth and the Moon to Solar System Bodies”, La Plata, Argentina

In addition, the MPC is also going to present some of our recent developments at the joint EPSC-DPS in Helsinki, Finland.