Wednesday plenary 4: Contributed talk
When
Where
Theme: Software, tools and standards for Solar System, heliophysics, and planetary research
MPEC Watch (https://sbnmpc.astro.umd.edu/mpecwatch/) is a utility that digests the Minor Planet Center’s publications to present statistical summaries of the reported observations of small bodies that are of high interest to the community. MPECs, or “Minor Planet Electronic Circulars” (https://minorplanetcenter.net/mpec/RecentMPECs.html), are issued in the form of emails and corresponding website postings, with their own DOIs by the Minor Planet Center for announcing discoveries of objects of interest (like Near-Earth Objects - NEOs, irregular satellites, or comets) and updates to the MPC’s database. MPEC Watch's backend component is responsible for creating and updating a SQLite database that contains metadata for all MPECs dating back to the first Circular in September 1993. The component queries the MPC website on a daily basis to add the previous day's MPECs to the database. The usage by the community of Planetary astronomers is the target audience. Observations critical to updating the orbits, follow-up, first-follow-up, and discoveries are all MPEC material, and MPEC Watch provides these in aggregate totals, as well as for individual observing sites (Figure 2). The observations by sites can be used to demonstrate the effectiveness of observing programs to the community (e.g. proposals and program reviews). We will present the suite products provided by MPEC Watch, along with the underlying architecture and future planned augmentations to the website.
This work is supported by the NASA Planetary Data System’s Small Bodies Node (NASA 80NSSC22M0024).