A Proposed Standard For Reporting Asteroid Lightcurve Data

Details A Proposed Standard For Reporting Asteroid Lightcurve Data A Proposed Standard For Reporting Asteroid Lightcurve Data

Oct 2010

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2010dps....42.3914s&link_type=abstract

American Astronomical Society, DPS meeting #42, #39.14; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, Vol. 42, p.1035

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Unlike astrometric data on asteroids, there is no generally accepted central repository for raw asteroid lightcurve data. There are several sites that accept such data, but each one has its own formatting and minimum data requirements, making it a time-consuming task to prepare raw data for submission. This is especially true for the "backyard astronomers", the group that has contributed the vast majority of asteroid lightcurves in the last 5-7 years. As a first step towards correcting this problem and making asteroid lightcurve data "universal", we propose a standard reporting format for asteroid lightcurve observations, much as the Minor Planet Center uses for astrometric observations. Like the FITS standard, metadata and data would be defined by a set of mandatory keyword/value pairs to assure the data's usability along with optional pairs to further describe the observations and data. This would allow someone to write a single parsing program to extract data from any number of observers to be used as he needs. We will establish a central upload point for lightcurve observations. Those data submitted using the new format will be immediately parsed into a set of database tables and then regularly converted as to needed to be used on a long-term archiving service, e.g., Strasbourg. Eventually, we hope that the Minor Planet Center or other entity might take over the entire system: standard, upload point, and data. Archival data and those not in the standard format could still be uploaded to our intermediate site. We will enlist volunteers to convert the data whenever possible and make it part of the archive. Those data that cannot be converted will remain available "as-is” for a researcher to do with them as he can.

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