Moira 6.2.1 - Wheel Asteroid Catalog

Release date: 2026-08-14

Public upgrade path: 6.2.0 to 6.2.1. Callers still on 6.1.x inherit the 6.2.0 admitted baseline plus this wheel catalog.

Moira 6.2.1 is a packaging and install-honesty patch. It ships a complete 25-body Type-13 catalog inside the moira-astro wheel so Chiron and the locked named set compute after pip install plus a planetary kernel. It does not change interpolation, light-time, public function signatures, or REST schemas.

In this release

• Wheel catalog moira-asteroids-wheel 2026.08.14.1 — one Type-13 shard, 25 named bodies, discovered as a second complete small-body catalog under moira/kernels/asteroids_wheel/.
• Honest kernel installer — moira-download-kernels no longer lists centaurs.bsp or minor_bodies.bsp as bundled wheel files. Those files do not ship and do not auto-load.
• Clearer misses — when a known asteroid identity has no loaded segment, asteroid_at names catalog 2026.08.12.1 and https://moira-astro.com/ephemerides.

The 25 bodies are Ceres, Pallas, Juno, Vesta, Astraea, Iris, Hygiea, Psyche, Eros, Lilith (1181), Amor, Chiron, Pholus, Nessus, Asbolus, Chariklo, Hylonome, Varuna, Ixion, Quaoar, Sedna, Orcus, Haumea, Eris, and Makemake.

Not in 6.2.1

• The 10,025-body catalog 2026.08.12.1 still does not ship in the wheel. It remains a separate complete install from the public archive.
• centaurs.bsp and minor_bodies.bsp are not hosted, bundled, or revived.
• No Track B, visibility, Track C, or website entitlement change.
• Generic JPL asteroids.bsp and sb441-n373s.bsp remain optional caller-managed files. They do not install Chiron and do not substitute for either Moira catalog.

Install

pip install moira-astro==6.2.1
moira-download-kernels --yes    # planetary kernel only is enough for Chiron

from datetime import datetime, timezone
from moira import Moira, Body

print(Moira().chart(
    datetime(1990, 6, 15, 12, tzinfo=timezone.utc),
    bodies=[Body.CHIRON],
))

list_kernels reports moira-asteroids-wheel 2026.08.14.1 OK (wheel) when the packaged catalog verifies.

Dual-catalog admission

If both the wheel catalog and a complete 2026.08.12.1 install are present, both load. KernelPool first-match prefers the higher-precedence complete catalog. Duplicate NAIF IDs are allowed. The 10,025-body package metadata manifest stays metadata-only and is not admitted.

Closes

TheDaniel166/moira#17 once the published wheel is confirmed to contain moira/kernels/asteroids_wheel/asteroid_shard_000.bsp.