Description of proposed project

I am an independent researcher developing algorithms that discover solar system objects hidden in databases of transient detections. This award will support the development and scaling of my custom HelioLinC implementation, which recovers over 95% of objects in the Rubin Observatory’s DP0.3 simulation and is already finding new objects daily in the Minor Planet Center’s Isolated Tracklet File (ITF).

HelioLinC “links” detections of solar system objects on different nights. It essentially looks for “dots” in astronomical images that weren’t present at a location previously and aren’t there later and asks: “does this transient dot connect to other transient dots at other times with a specific orbit?” If you can describe an orbit that passes through a bunch of dots at their respective observation times, you can validate that these dots belong to a singular moving object in the solar system – an asteroid most commonly.

In 2026, the Vera C. Rubin Observatory will begin its Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST). Rubin will produce the largest database of dots ever assembled. This database will contain millions of asteroids, near-Earth objects (NEOs), trans-Neptunian objects (TNOs), interstellar objects (ISOs) and maybe even the hypothesized Planet Nine – but we will need to pull them out of the data first.

The funds from this award will go to purchasing compute to enable Rubin data processing as well as more thorough searches of the MPC’s data. I am also always refining and extending the capabilities of my linking software and this award will support continued improvements that I have planned in 2026.

Why are you qualified to work on this?

I’m qualified to work on solar system object detection because I already identify a lot of new solar system objects with my HelioLinC implementation. The Minor Planet Center keeps track of how many objects contributors “identify” – that is: link dots together with other dots in a huge database of dots to confirm the identification of a new object. In 2024 I was in the top 10 of ITF-ITF linkers (a category which results in newly designated objects). I find new objects almost every day.

I also attend and contribute at professional astronomy conferences. Most recently I presented a poster on a HelioLinC optimization that reduces compute time requirements for near-Earth object detection which are among the most compute intensive objects to find due to their non-linearly varying heliocentric distances in time requiring more orbit hypotheses than other bodies in the solar system.

I have a B.S. in Physics and a M.S. in Aerospace Engineering with an emphasis on Astrodynamics.

More at: benengebreth.org