The astorb database at Lowell Observatory
Nicholas Moskovitz, L. H. Wasserman, Brian Burt, Robert Schottland, E. Bowell, M. S. Bailen, Mikael Granvik
Abstract
The astorb database at Lowell Observatory is an actively curated catalog of all known asteroids in the Solar System. astorb has heritage dating back to the 1970s and has been publicly accessible since the 1990s. Work began in 2015 to modernize the underlying database infrastructure, operational software, and associated web applications. That effort involved the expansion of astorb to incorporate new data such as physical properties (e.g. albedo, colors, spectral types) from a variety of sources. The data in astorb are used to support a number of research tools hosted at https://asteroid.lowell.edu. Here we present a full description of the software tools, computational foundation, and data products upon which the astorb ecosystem has been built.