Frequently Asked Questions
Precovery can take anywhere from a few minutes to tens of minutes to run, depending on the run parameters. The start and end dates, the number of datasets searched, and how many matches are found all impact the run time. If traffic on the website is high, it may take longer than expected for results to appear.
A match is a returned precovery observation. A ‘miss’ is when an image exists where the object was predicted to be, but no corresponding observation was detected. This could be for a number of reasons, such as if the object is too dim or passing near to another bright object, or if at this point in the object's orbit it is too faint to be detected.
The precovery results returned are not filtered for prior attribution. They may include new observations as well as observations already submitted to the MPC. A tool allowing cross-matching against the MPC is in development.
Precovery will return any moving source within the specified arc-tolerance limit. False positives are possible, so additional vetting is suggested.
Cutout images are retrieved directly from the source observatory's archives. Sometimes those archives don't have images available, even though they might have reported a detection of a point source. As of September 2023, ZTF's image archives are only updated to May 2023, and NOIRLab archives of DECam data only provide a subselection of images. Cutouts might also be unavailable because of downtime in those archival services, or failures in our post-processing of images.
Currently, submission is a manual process and it requires some due diligence. We are working on a tool to automate this process, but it is not yet available. First, you will need to crossmatch the observations returned by ADAM::Precovery to determine which, if any, are unreported. You will also need to verify from the cutouts that the observations appear real and match with their predicted position and velocity. After this, you will need to prepare the ADES file for submission to the MPC. See an example here.
The astrometry can be retrieved from the CSV file made available on the results page. You will need to retrieve infromation from the observatory to properly fill out fields such as observers and telescope data. You will also need to include ADAM::Precovery under objectDetection and our members as the list of measurers.
# measurers ! name K. Kiker ! name M. Juric ! name E. Lu ! name J. Moeyens ! name A. Posner ! name D. Remy ! name N. Tellis ! name A. Koumjian ! name S. Nelson ! name# software ! objectDetection Asteroid Institute, ADAM::Precovery
Please reach out if you have questions and let us know about your submissions! We would love to hear about your experience and how we can improve the process.
Please credit Asteroid Institute, ADAM::Precovery b612.ai when using results from Precovery and any additional ADAM services.