SAVE THE LIGHTCURVES! AN UPDATE ON THE ALCDEF PROJECT

The Asteroid Lightcurve Data Exchange Format (ALCDEF) project has been in development for more than five years. To date, almost 2.5 million time-series data points for more than 11400 asteroids have been submitted to the ALCDEF database hosted on the Minor Planet Center web site. These raw time-series observations have helped researchers produce hundreds of shape and spin axis models. The recent introduction of the S-ALCDEF (Simple-ALCDEF) page is hoped to encourage that even more data be submitted and so expedite and facilitate research efforts that depend on these type of data.