MP3C - the Minor Planet Physical Properties Catalogue: a New VO Service For Multi-database Query

In the last few years we witnessed a large growth in the number of asteroids for which we have physical properties. However, these data are dispersed in a multiplicity of catalogs. Extracting data and combining them for further analysis requires custom tools, a situation further complicated by the variety of data sources, some of them standardized (Planetary Data System) others not. With these problems in mind, we created a new Virtual Observatory service named “Minor Planet Physical Properties Catalogue” (abbreviated as MP3C - http://mp3c.oca.eu/). MP3C is not a new database, but rather a portal allowing the user to access selected properties of objects by easy SQL query, even from different sources. At present, such diverse data as orbital parameters, photometric and light curve parameters, sizes and albedos derived by IRAS, AKARI and WISE, SDSS colors, SMASS taxonomy, family membership, satellite data, stellar occultation results, are included. Other data sources will be added in the near future. The physical properties output of the MP3C can be tuned by the users by query criteria based upon ranges of values of the ingested quantities. The resulting list of object can be used for interactive plots through standard VO tools such as TOPCAT. Also, their ephemerids and visibilities from given sites can be computed. We are targeting full VO compliance for providing a new standardized service to the community.