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, n-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.
@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)