Moira 5.2.3 - Installed Small-Body Manifest Readiness

Release date: 2026-07-25
Public upgrade path: 5.2.2 to 5.2.3

Moira 5.2.3 is an operational-correctness patch for asteroid and comet kernel discovery. It does not change astronomical calculations, catalog membership, public result vessels, or BSP data.

What Changed

Published wheels retain asteroid and comet manifests as catalog and provenance metadata, while their large BSP shards remain separately installed resources. Earlier automatic discovery treated the presence of those metadata files as proof that the corresponding ephemeris was installed. A wheel used alongside an external small-body ephemeris could therefore report a missing packaged shard in Moira.kernel_status and the server /ready receipt even though the external ephemeris was loaded and functional.

Automatic discovery now admits a manifest only when at least one shard it references is present:

• metadata-only wheel manifests remain available as packaged records but are not treated as installed ephemerides;
• complete external manifests load normally;
• partial installations remain discoverable so the shard loader rejects them rather than silently hiding corruption; and
• MOIRA_SOVEREIGN_SMALL_BODY_MANIFEST remains an explicit, strict operator instruction and is never suppressed by automatic discovery policy.

Asteroid And Comet Data Boundary

No asteroid or comet manifest content, BSP shard, catalog identity, family membership, coverage interval, or NAIF mapping changed in this release. Existing external ephemerides remain the positional authority until a later shard set is fully built, validated, and admitted as one coherent manifest-owned resource.

Validation

The release exercises:

• metadata-only automatic discovery;
• complete installed-manifest discovery;
• partial-installation fail visibility;
• explicit-manifest fail visibility;
• facade kernel readiness; and
• REST server startup and /ready behavior.

A wheel-shaped isolated installation confirms that packaged manifests without their large BSP shards are not admitted as installed ephemerides.