Kete: open source solar system simulation software

Kete is an open source software library designed to predict the location of all known asteroids and comets to within sub-arcsecond precision on a laptop. Kete provides a number of tools to calculate object states and expected magnitudes (Visible and IR), and is designed to operate on the entire catalog of solar system objects within a few centuries from today. The NEO Surveyor and SphereX telescopes are using Kete to predict and label known solar system objects in all images that are captured. Kete has also been used to perform precovery on asteroids, in one case identifying an asteroid in a glass plate from Palomar Mountain in 1950. The tools may be combined in many ways to solve complex problems, examples include identifying all known asteroids in a given FITs image, calculating syndyne/synchrone curves for comets, performing monte-carlo simulations of the orbital uncertainty of an asteroids orbit for precovery, and observation planning.