Glossary¶
- Asteroid name-number index¶
The index of the currently numbered asteroids including their numbers, names or designations, and SsODNet IDs. It is stored as
index.pkl
in the cache directory and can be updated with$ rocks update
.- Cache Directory¶
Storage location for the retrieved ssoCards and datacloud catalogues, as well as the asteroid name-number index and ssoCard metadata files. Located in the user’s home directory as
~/.cache/rocks
.- Datacloud Catalogue¶
The datacloud is an aggregation of publicly available data of minor planets. The catalogues it provides contain e.g. asteroid diameters and albedos (
diamalbedo
), asteroid proper elements (astdys
), or measurements of the Yarkovsky effect (yarkovskies
). Each catalogue contains data on many asteroids and each asteroid can appear multiple times in the catalogue. They are retrieved and stored asJSON
files in the cache directory.- DataCloudDataFrame¶
The
python
implementation of a datacloud catalogue is theDataCloudDataFrame
class. As the name suggests, it is a subclass of thepandas
DataFrame
and inherits its properties. The only difference to theDataFrame
is the overloadedplot()
method and the addedweighted_average()
method. by the abbreviation on the right.- Identifier¶
A user-provided string, float, or integer, which serves to identify an asteroid. It can refer to the asteroid’s name (
"Eos"
), the number (221
), previous or current designations ("1882 BA"
), packed designations ("I82B00A"
) and other aliases as defined by quaero. The identifier is not case-sensitive and frequent shortforms (such as dropping the whitespace in the designation,"1882BA"
) are accepted as well.- ssoCard¶
The ssoCard represents the best available measurements (or a product thereof) of the parameters of a single asteroid. Each asteroid has a single ssoCard and each ssoCard refers to a single asteroid. They are retrieved and stored as
JSON
files in the cache directory.- SsODNet¶
The Virtual Observatory Solar system Open Database Network SsODNet is a name resolver and data aggregator for minor planets.
- SsODNet ID¶
The identifier used by the SsODNet database to refer to this specific asteroid. For
(1) Ceres
, it’sCeres
. For2021 JB32
, it’s2021_JB32
. Queries for asteroid name resolution or data are faster when providing this identifier right away.