Dear all,
I hope you will join us for the April LINCC Tech Talk session that will take place on Thursday, April 10, at 10h PT = 13h ET = 13h CLT = 19h CET on Zoom (https://ls.st/lincc-talks ). We will hear from Matt Holman, who will talk about the LAYUP package, orbit fitting at LSST scale.
Orbit Fitting at LSST Scale by Matt Holman
Fitting orbits is essential to LSST solar system science. Discovery and orbital classification are the top priorities in the LSST Solar System Science Collaboration’s Roadmap (Schwamb et al 2019), but there is no orbit fitting package that can support the needs of the planetary community in the Rubin era.
Orbit fitting is the process of minimizing the difference between a set of observed sky-plane positions and those predicted by a model of a small body orbiting in our solar system. Although the problem is simple to state, we need a software solution that can handle fitting roughly a billion astrometric points divided among ~5 million objects. We need an industrial strength tool that is robust; highly scalable; easy to install, use, and maintain.
I will present LAYUP, a package we are developing in a LINCC Frameworks Incubator to fill this need. LAYUP builds upon the the ASSIST integrator (https://github.com/matthewholman/assist; Holman et al 2023) and the ephemeris generation components of Sorcha (https://github.com/dirac-institute/sorcha; Merritt et al 2025; Holman et al 2025). In this time, I will describe LAYUP’s design, components, and expected use cases.
LINCC Tech Talks are held on the second Thursday of every month. Events are also advertised at our web page and also provided in calendar form ; and the #lincc-tech-talks LSSTC Slack channel is always available for discussions before, during, and after the talks.