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.Comment: 57 Pages, 26 Figures, 13 Table

Discovering Earth’s transient moons with the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope

“…In the current baseline approach the data is processed through LSST's Moving Object Processing System (MOPS; see Denneau et al, 2013, for a description of the original Pan-STARRS MOPS) using the findtracklets and the linktracklets algorithms by Kubica et al (2007) followed by initial orbit computation. Detections in difference images will first be linked into single-night batches of observations colloquially known as tracklets using the findtracklets algorithm.…”

An Observational Upper Limit on the Interstellar Number Density of Asteroids and Comets

“…The MD survey visited a single field 8×/night with filter-dependent exposure times of 120-240 s in the p 3 filters. The solar system survey (SS) used 5%-6% of the survey time but was increased to 12% of the survey time after 2012 (Denneau et al 2013). It used the w P1 filter with 45 s exposures and mostly visited fields near opposition, or the "sweetspots" near the ecliptic at solar elongations of -  60 90 .…”

“…The Pan-STARRS1 MOPS can link multiple observations of the same object together within a night into "tracklets," combine tracklets from different nights into "tracks," calculate orbital elements, perform attribution of new tracklets to known objects, identify "precoveries" of historical tracklets associated with newly calculated orbits, and allow for manual vetting of all the data (Denneau et al 2013). We used MOPS to simulate the detection of our synthetic ISOs in Pan-STARRS1, CSS, and MLS fields.…”

Rising from Ashes or Dying Flash? The Mega Outburst of Small Comet 289P/Blanpain in 2013∗

“…Based on the result of the search as well as Weryk's comments, we conclude that P/Blanpain was already in outburst at least 1 day before the official rediscovery on 2013 July 4, but the 49-day gap between the 2013 July 3 detection and the last image that covers the predicted position of P/Blanpain (2013 May 15) makes it difficult to pinpoint the exact onset time of the outburst. The non-detections on 2013 May 15, August 24 and September 9 sets an upper limit of V ≈ 22.5 of the comet, based on the typical survey depth of Pan-STARRS (Denneau et al 2013).…”