Solar System processing (SSP)#

The DP2 Solar System processing and data products concentrate on associations between Rubin difference image detections (DiaSources) and previously known small bodies, and do not include a blind moving object search or catalogs derived from Rubin observations alone. For more information, see Solar System source detection and association.

Rubin searched for and discovered new Solar System objects during a period of pre-DP2 small body tracklet linking and orbit fitting. That campaign preceded the official DP2 release processing, so that objects discovered by Rubin and reported to the Minor Planet Center (MPC) before the association cutoff for DP2 processing occurred, were able to be included in the DP2 known/associated object data products. DP2 does not, however, deliver a standalone catalog of Rubin discoveries; these Rubin-discovery-only catalogs will be delivered in future Data Releases. The Solar System Prompt Processing discoveries will be described once they are made available by Rubin. Currently, all Solar System objects discovered by Rubin get reported to and are made available via the Minor Planet Center and the B612 Foundation’s Asteroid Institute (see Prompt Products Data Access for more information).

The DP2 data products deliver associations between Rubin difference image detections (DiaSources) and known small bodies (SSSource) as well as Rubin-derived object-level photometry and summary properties (SSObject). DP2 also includes snapshots of three tables from the Minor Planet Center (MPC) PostgreSQL database (see DP2 catalogs for details):

Table	Purpose
SSSource	One row per association between a `DiaSource` and a known object’s predicted position, with selected measured and ephemeris quantities.
SSObject	One row per recovered known object, with observation summaries, per-band absolute-magnitude fits, and selected orbit-derived quantities.
mpc_orbits	An MPC orbit-catalog snapshot containing orbital elements and associated fit information.
current_identifications	An MPC mapping of primary and secondary provisional designations for the same physical object.
numbered_identifications	An MPC mapping between permanent numbers and primary provisional designations.

The three MPC tables retain the upstream MPC field semantics rather than being recomputed from Rubin DP2 observations. The delivered mpc_orbits reference product is the same snapshot of the mpc_orbits table from the Minor Planet Center Database from 2026 March 13 that was used as input to association.