Real asteroids catalog
I made a small program that processes the asteroids database from the Minor Planets Center. It have 600,000+ asteroids, Kuiper belt objects and other small bodies. Currently SE can't handle such great amount of objects, so program makes a selection of Main belt asteroids larger than 10 km, Juiper trojans greater than 50 km etc. Resulting catalog consists of 2000+ objects:
Inner Solar System with Main belt, Jupiter trojans, and NEOs (Near-Earth Objects).
Outer Solar System with Kiuper belt, Centaturs, Plutinos, Resonant TNOs and Scattered disk objects. Note the gaps caused by Milky Way (there are less objects discovered in sky area covered by Milky Way, because millions of background stars making this difficult).
There is a great problem with such a big catalog - loading time is soo big. I must improve performance of the script parser, or implement a new format for catalogs. I think of a table format, that can be used for asteroids, exoplanets and exoplanet host stars. It may look like this:
AbsM Slope Epoch MeanAnom ArgOfPeri AscNode Inclin Eccentr MeanMotion SMA Name
3.34 0.12 2456401 327.85412 72.16707 80.33008 10.59423 0.0761669 0.21402110 2.7679930 "Ceres"
4.13 0.11 2456401 310.04462 309.95442 173.11974 34.83680 0.2314997 0.21355547 2.7720151 "Pallas"
5.33 0.32 2456401 257.63928 248.30984 169.88278 12.97937 0.2553054 0.22581776 2.6707341 "Juno"
3.20 0.32 2456401 218.17155 150.94008 103.85019 7.13991 0.0882571 0.27143216 2.3624458 "Vesta"
6.85 0.15 2456401 117.11980 358.85091 141.59723 5.36723 0.1907416 0.23856139 2.5747552 "Astraea"
5.71 0.24 2456401 232.72225 239.37712 138.71044 14.74654 0.2017542 0.26086353 2.4258306 "Hebe"
5.51 0.15 2456401 271.79314 145.38098 259.63714 5.52450 0.2304693 0.26737519 2.3862832 "Iris"
6.49 0.28 2456401 250.94554 285.32996 110.92216 5.88785 0.1562033 0.30169179 2.2017114 "Flora"
6.28 0.17 2456401 49.27220 5.82053 68.94445 5.57523 0.1226962 0.26743715 2.3859146 "Metis"
5.43 0.15 2456401 121.95663 312.75812 283.41815 3.84190 0.1161087 0.17738834 3.1370348 "Hygiea"
This format is more compact and easy to load, but don't allow using parameters that are missing in the header. Objects that uses additional parameters must still use the old (script) catalog format.