Today, for the first time, my pipeline in JupyterLab successfully identified a comet in Rubin alerts: C/2025 A4. It’s a great feeling, but I understand this is only a starting point.
Important note: this was a single detection, not a multiple-detection tracklet, as I would normally expect for a comet or asteroid. I see many very interesting anomalous objects in single detections. Even if some of them are moving, they are not linked into tracklets in the Rubin alerts I’m working with.
If I understand correctly, under the current Solar System pipeline rules, such single detections will not enter the Solar System pipeline, because they need at least two or three detections within a certain time window (14 days). A single detection has its own diaObjectId, but under that ID there is only one detection.
So my question is: in the future, will Rubin work with anomalous single-detection objects in some systematic way, or will this remain mostly manual?
