Tip
We strongly recommend all new users read the Sorcha documentation before beginning any science-quality simulations.
Welcome to Sorcha's documentation!
This documentation site contains an installation guide, an overview of how Sorcha
works, tutorials, and demonstration notebooks that show how each of the various components within Sorcha work and can be customized.
See also
For a more detailed description of Sorcha and how it works, please see Merritt et al. (2025) and Holman et al. (2025).
Tip
To keep up with the latest Sorcha updates and annoucements, we recommend signing up for our google group.
Warning
Sorcha v1.0 has been released on conda-forge and pypi. The code is still in the JOSS (Journal of Open Source Software) review process, We expect minimal changes, but there could be a minor bug fix or two as that finalizes. So do install the latest version before finalizing your publication ready simulation output. The code in the repository has been validated (see the various validation notebooks we provide for LSST-like moving object discovery/linking).
What is Sorcha?
Sorcha (pronounced "sur-kha"; derived from the Old Irish word for 'light' or 'brightness') is an open-source Solar System survey simulator written in Python.
Sorcha estimates the brightness of simulated Solar System small bodies and determines which ones the survey could detect in
each of the survey's observations based on user set criteria. Sorcha has been designed with the Vera C. Rubin Observatory Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST)
in mind. The software has a modular design, and our code can be adapted to be used with any survey.