MACADAMIA: A Multi-Archive Database of Archival Asteroid Photometry

A large amount of archival optical image data obtained by large (>2.5m) telescopes, often using extremely wide-field imagers (e.g., CFHT’s MegaCam, Subaru’s SuprimeCam, and the Dark Energy Camera, or DECam), has been quietly but steadily accumulating over the last two decades. Most of these data were obtained as part of observational programs completely unrelated to solar system science, meaning that the vast majority of detections (likely numbering in the millions) of solar system objects in these images have never been analyzed. To make use of this enormous, essentially untapped reservoir of solar system data, we have developed a modular data reduction pipeline for performing uniform measurements (including absolute photometric calibration) of numbered asteroids found in archival data from a variety of telescopes and instruments, computing or retrieving relevant metadata parameters, and compiling the results into a single queryable database that can be used to conduct a broad range of scientific investigations. We have dubbed this database the Multi-Archive Catalog of Asteroid Detections And Measurements for Interactive Access, or MACADAMIA. We will present an overview of the elements of the MACADAMIA data reduction pipeline as well as the results of its application on Sloan Digital Sky Survey data which comprise the first installment of the MACADAMIA database. We will also discuss near-term plans for the expansion of the MACADAMIA database as well as describe expected use cases for the system. This work is supported by the NASA PDART program via Grant NNX17AL01G.