The Pan-STARRS Moving Object Processing System
Abstract
We describe the Pan-STARRS Moving Object Processing System (MOPS), a modern software package that produces automatic asteroid discoveries and identifications from catalogs of transient detections from next-generation astronomical survey telescopes. MOPS achieves > 99.5% efficiency in producing orbits from a synthetic but realistic population of asteroids whose measurements were simulated for a Pan-STARRS4-class telescope. Additionally, using a non-physical grid population, we demonstrate that MOPS can detect populations of currently unknown objects such as interstellar asteroids. MOPS has been adapted successfully to the prototype Pan-STARRS1 telescope despite differences in expected false detection rates, fill-factor loss and relatively sparse observing cadence compared to a hypothetical Pan-STARRS4 telescope and survey. MOPS remains >99.5% efficient at detecting objects on a single night but drops to 80% efficiency at producing orbits for objects detected on multiple nights. This loss is primarily due to configurable MOPS processing limits that are not yet tuned for the Pan-STARRS1 mission. The core MOPS software package is the product of more than 15 person-years of software development and incorporates countless additional years of effort in third-party software to perform lower-level functions such as spatial searching or orbit determination. We describe the high-level design of MOPS and essential subcomponents, the suitability of MOPS for other survey programs, and suggest a road map for future MOPS development.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1302.7281,
title = {The Pan-STARRS Moving Object Processing System},
author = {Larry Denneau and Robert Jedicke and Tommy Grav and Mikael Granvik and Jeremy Kubica and Andrea Milani and Peter Veres and Richard Wainscoat and Daniel Chang and Francesco Pierfederici and N. Kaiser and K. C. Chambers and J. N. Heasley and Eugene. A. Magnier and P. A. Price and Jonathan Myers and Jan Kleyna and Henry Hsieh and Davide Farnocchia and Chris Waters and W. H. Sweeney and Denver Green and Bryce Bolin and W. S. Burgett and J. S. Morgan and John L. Tonry and K. W. Hodapp and Serge Chastel and Steve Chesley and Alan Fitzsimmons and Matthew Holman and Tim Spahr and David Tholen and Gareth V. Williams and Shinsuke Abe and J. D. Armstrong and Terry H. Bressi and Robert Holmes and Tim Lister and Robert S. McMillan and Marco Micheli and Eileen V. Ryan and William H. Ryan and James V. Scotti},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1302.7281},
year = {2015}
}
Comments
57 Pages, 26 Figures, 13 Tables