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Here's how you use the asteroid precovery service in the Spitzer Heritage Archive, or
SHA. When you first load the SHA, you're dropped into a position search. But, what we want
here is the "precovery" search. For this example, I'm going to put in the NAIF ID of an object
I happen to know is in there. It resolves the NAIF ID and tells you what the name of
the object is. If you just click search now, it will search the entire Spitzer Heritage
Archive, which is 10 years' worth of data. That will take a very long time. In the interest
of time for this example, I'm going to search just for the dates that I happen to know that
this object was observed. So, I'm going to search between 2007 January and 2007 March.
Search.
It will take a few minutes. It's come back with some results. So, the way that this displays
is different than the rest of the SHA. It comes up by default in grid mode, because
it's showing us each one of the individual BCDs in which the object was retrieved. Over
here, if you click on the "orbital path coverage" you can see a line denoting the orbital path,
and the orange x's correspond to observations that were retrieved out of the Spitzer archive.
The data coverage here shows the [outlines of] individual data frames that were retrieved.
Data shows the individual data frames, which are also what is shown here. The orange x's
indicate positions of the asteroid; the box indicates the position of the asteroid at
the time of observation. You can change this view back and forth from the table or grid
mode. The grid mode is somewhat easier to understand in terms of where the object is,
or should be, in these images. To download data, go back to the list mode, select all,
and prepare download. Or, if you prefer, from the grid mode, select individual observations
that you wish to retrieve.