What Sorcha Does Not Handle

Here we note the effects that are not currently captured within this survey simulator. With the modular nature of the package, it should be straightforward to develop functions to handle these in the future. If you want to add any of these features into Sorcha, please check out our Reporting Issues, Proposing Changes, and Contributing page.

Here is a short summary of the key effects not accounted for in Sorcha:

  • Properly simulating the locations of the 16 massive asteroid perturbers in the main belt. Further details can be found here.

  • Changing phase curves due to changing viewing angles (impacts some inner Solar System objects)

  • Stellar crowding as a function of galactic latitude

  • Non-gravitational forces including cometary outgassing or Yarkovsky or YORP (Yarkovsky–O'Keefe–Radzievskii–Paddack) effect. Although not directly handled, you can input your own ephemeris files that account for these effects if required.

  • Properly handling collisions between the planets and the simulated objects

  • Removing simulated objects due to small body collisions and breakup events

  • Handling or including false detections/linkages

  • Using space-based or moving observatory locations. We currently require an observatory code for a stationary observatory on the Earth with a location that is reported to the Minor Planet Center.

See also

We do have methods for users to easily develop their own functions for adjusting the apparent magnitude of the simulated objects due to cometary activity, rotational light curves, cometary outbursts, etc. We have some basic functionality already built for simple sinusoidal rotational light curves and cometary activity. Further details can be found here.

Warning

If you simulate the orbits of 16 massive asteroid perturbers listed here, you will get POOR results with the internal Sorcha ephemeris generator because of how the n-body integration is set up. We recommend getting the positions of these asteroids from some other source and inputting them as an external ephemeris file.