Progress: January-March 2026

I liked the year-end progress report I put out in December of last year, so I'm going to try to write more updates like that every few months. It helps me remember that all of the little things add up to bigger things over the course of a year. So here's what's been going on the past few months.

I'm writing a paper on LambertLink

It's been a long time coming, but I've finally started formally writing up the solar system object linking algorithm I've built over the past few years in collaboration with Siegfried Eggl and Ari Heinze. And it's time to give it a unique name too. Yes, it's still a variant of Matthew Holman's original HelioLinC, but at this point it's just confusing to be referring to so-and-so's variant of HelioLinC with modifications X and Y. There are at least 3 different HelioLinC variants out there that I know of that depart from the original HelioLinC formulation in different ways. LambertLink is my version and is the same fundamental algorithm I've been working on for the past 3-4 years. It uses a Lambert solver to find orbits from tracklets and clusters in the Lambert 'basis' (i.e. two position vectors at two reference epochs). Obviously, the paper will go into more detail than that, but sometimes it feels like those two points are all you really need to know.

I found 3 new solar system objects in Rubin's DP1 data

Rubin released DP1 (Data Preview 1) last June with data gathered from the commissioning camera (ComCam) that was installed at the observatory in 2024 to test the telescope before the real, permanent (and much larger) camera was installed. But ComCam was a capable instrument in its own right and the data gathered during its observing time was eventually packaged up into a data preview for the Rubin community. It's a small slice of data compared to what will eventually be produced by the telescope, but Rubin's solar system processing pipelines found 93 new solar system objects in the DP1 data. I started looking at the data in the Fall of last year and fairly quickly found 3 more previously unknown objects! The understandably slow part was getting vetted by Rubin and the MPC to submit Rubin data to get these objects designated. Many thanks to Mario Juric for guiding me through that process (and building the process along the way)! By January I had all the necessary permissions and all 3 objects were quickly designated by the MPC when I submitted them (2024 WO107, 2024 WQ108 and 2024 WR108). Now that I have a program code for the Rubin Observatory I should be good to submit data once the real camera and real data are in place later this year. 🤞

New linker for 3-nighters across apparitions: 3DB-3DB (another ITF-ITF method)

You find a lot of marginal candidates linkages when searching the ITF for solar system objects with HelioLinC/LambertLink. These are usually 3-nighters that are right on the threshold of 'good enough' designation-wise by MPC's criteria but for various reasons fall short. Maybe a residual is slightly outside the bounds of expectation or maybe the uncertainty on an orbital element is a bit bigger than you'd like it to be. Finding the object on a 4th night is usually the remedy for this problem but you often can't produce that 4th night of data when you search the ITF along the 3-nighter's trajectory because no one has observed it on that 4th night yet. I have thousands of orbits made up of tracklets in the ITF that fit this pattern. I store them in a database I refer to as 3DB — a database of 3-nighters that are not good enough to be submittable to the MPC.

LambertLink generally operates over a single apparition. So one thing you can do with the 3DB data is look for 3-nighters across more than one apparition (an apparition is defined as observations that have no gaps greater than 237 days between them) that belong to the same object. I've started doing that via a similar method to what I use to identify DES-DES linkages. It's not wildly productive, but I have found a few dozen new objects this way after 2-ish months of searching my 3DB database daily. When I write up the DES-DES linking technique, I'll write up the 3DB-3DB strategy as well as they're very closely related.

Some new compute

I used part of the ACX grant money I received and wrote about in December to purchase a new M4 Mac Mini. This Mini is already running my LambertLink ITF-ITF pipeline and is about 8x faster than the 5 year old spare laptop I was using before. It's really a huge improvement and I'm sure I've found many more objects than I otherwise would have because I can search not only more ITF data daily, but I can also test more orbit hypotheses for each search. I'm really grateful to Scott Alexander for the ACX grant award which led to this upgrade.

I was also gifted a 2 year old M2 Mac Mini by Daniel Green — founder of camelcamelcamel.com and my former business partner. It's not as fast as a new Mini, but it will be perfect for the relatively less compute intensive DES-DES and 3DB-3DB linkers to run on (they're currently running on my daily driver laptop as cron jobs!). Thanks Dan!

Published: 4/6/2026