English

Kete: Predicting Known Minor Bodies in Images

Earth and Planetary Astrophysics 2025-09-08 v1 Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics

Abstract

Kete is an open-source software package for quickly and accurately predicting the positions and magnitudes of asteroids and comets in large-scale, all-sky surveys. It can predict observable objects for any ground or space-based telescope. Kete contains a collection of tools, including simple optical and thermal modeling, nn-body orbit calculations, and custom multi-threaded SPICE kernel support. It can be used for observation planning, pre-discovery of detections at a large scale, and labeling known solar system objects in images. Here we demonstrate some of the capabilities by predicting all observations of every numbered asteroid seen by the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) and Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF) surveys during single years of their operations, predicting locations and magnitudes of 756,999 asteroids in over 11 million images.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2509.04666,
  title  = {Kete: Predicting Known Minor Bodies in Images},
  author = {D. Dahlen and Y. G. Kwon and J. R. Masiero and T. Spahr and A. K. Mainzer},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2509.04666},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

10 pages, 9 figures, submitted to A&A (under review)