Show HN: rust based orbit calculations for asteroids/comets

Hi all,

Here is a library which enables high precision orbit predictions of all known asteroids and comets. Its designed to calculate the entire catalog of known objects at once on a laptop.

The core math is written in rust, with a python wrapper.

I began writing it while I was at Caltech working on the NEO Surveyor project. I open sourced it and have since left Caltech to start a PhD in comet research.

I have used it to accurately predict every observation of asteroids and comets seen by WISE/NEOWISE and ZTF telescopes over 14 years of data. That is 10s of millions of observations. I actually used it to validate the observations, as there had been a number of submission errors over the years, which have been mostly corrected.

An earlier version of this code is being used to identify known objects in images taken by the SphereX telescope, and will be used for that on NEO Surveyor.

Some fun things you can use it for:

Someone gave me a 70 year old slide from the palomar observatory where an asteroid was noted, but no one knew what it was. I used this code to identify it:

https://dahlend.github.io/kete/tutorials/palomar.html

Given a image of the sky, mark where the known asteroids are:

https://dahlend.github.io/kete/tutorials/kona.html

Calculate the direction that dust from a comet will move:

https://dahlend.github.io/kete/auto_examples/plot_comet.html

This is the first version release where I am building a single binary for all python version 3.9+. If anyone has pip install issues please let me know!