kete

Im a developer for the upcoming space telescope NEO Surveyor (Near Earth Object Surveyor). I actually work quite a bit with a number of people on the team up at JPL, Horizons is the canonical source for ephemeris information. Another vital part of the chain is the Minor Planet Center (MPC), which is where all observations of asteroids and comets are sent by the community. The MPC is the international authority for these observations, which JPL ingests and computes orbits for (though the MPC also has to compute orbits as a part of their work). As a part of my work I have written a rust/python package[1] to compute the position of asteroids accurately using the ephemeris data provided by these two excellent sources. For the people who use SPICE kernels (a rather old binary format for storing orbital ephemeris), I have also written a custom