As the first year of operation for the Vera C. Rubin Observatory's Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) approaches, the small body research community braces for a surge of millions of discoveries, including an estimated 40,000 new Trans-Neptunian Objects (TNOs). In anticipation of this huge influx of data, the development of accessible, open-source software for quick and easy dynamical characterization has become a priority in the solar system community. To address this need, we the Small Body Dynamics Tool (SBDynT) for the small bodies community, with funding from NASA PDART program grant #80NSSC22K0512.
SBDynT is built to provide easy access to the following types of dynamical characterization for small body research:
- Initializing and simulating high-fidelity REBOUND orbital models of Solar System small bodies. This can be done for known objects using orbital data from the MPC or JPL Horizons, or can be done for newly discovered objects with provided orbital parameters.
- Producing synthetic proper elements from orbital REBOUND simulations.
- Identifying small body resonance occupation in the inner and outer Solar System with machine learning. (See Kat Volk’s .)
- Identifying long term stability and chaos indicators for small bodies.
In this presentation, I will showcase some of the current capabilities of SBDynT, such as its ability to calculate synthetic proper elements, with results comparable to the published catalogs of proper elements, such as AstDys.
SBDynT is now available on our Github repository here: https://github.com/small-body-dynamics/SBDynT. We invite suggestions for additional features to be included in SBDynT, so please reach out to myself or Kat Volk if you have any requests/suggestions.