The Solar System Notification Alert Processing System (SNAPS): Design, Architecture, and First Data Release (SNAPShot1)

TL;DR

SNAPS is a system that processes and releases data on Solar System objects from sky surveys, demonstrating high reliability and enabling new asteroid science, with plans to scale to LSST data volumes.

Contribution

This paper introduces the design, architecture, and initial data release of SNAPS, a new automated system for processing Solar System alert data from all-sky surveys.

Findings

SNAPS data processing is highly reliable based on comparisons with previous results.

No known asteroids with very short periods and high amplitudes, suggesting they are strengthless.

Differences in period distributions of Jupiter Trojan asteroids imply different shape distributions.

Abstract

We present here the design, architecture, and first data release for the Solar System Notification Alert Processing System (SNAPS). SNAPS is a Solar System broker that ingests alert data from all-sky surveys. At present, we ingest data from the Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF) public survey, and we will ingest data from the forthcoming Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) when it comes online. SNAPS is an official LSST downstream broker. In this paper we present the SNAPS design goals and requirements. We describe the details of our automatic pipeline processing in which physical properties of asteroids are derived. We present SNAPShot1, our first data release, which contains 5,458,459 observations of 31,693 asteroids observed by ZTF from July, 2018, through May, 2020. By comparing a number of derived properties for this ensemble to previously published results for overlapping objects we show that our automatic processing is highly reliable. We present a short list of science results, among many that will be enabled by our SNAPS catalog: (1) we demonstrate that there are no known asteroids with very short periods and high amplitudes, which clearly indicates that in general asteroids in the size range 0.3--20 km are strengthless; (2) we find no difference in the period distributions of Jupiter Trojan asteroids, implying that the L4 and L5 cloud have different shape distributions; and (3) we highlight several individual asteroids of interest. Finally, we describe future work for SNAPS and our ability to operate at LSST scale.