Stop telling the reader that the hundred directly imaged exoplanets were never imaged

Every exoplanet card without a map ended "Not an observation — no image of this world exists.",
and 395b613 wrote that rule into a comment ("Only an exoplanet has never been imaged") and a test.
The NASA Exoplanet Archive flags 102 planets as detected by imaging (ima_flag), all 102 of them in
exoplanets.json: HR 8799 b to e (Marois et al. 2008), bet Pic b, 51 Eri b, AF Lep b, and bet Pic c
and eps Ind A b, found by radial velocity and imaged since. The review read the sentence on the
live pages of HR 8799 b, 51 Eri b and bet Pic b.

The ETL now asks the archive for those names in a query of its own, cached apart from the main
table so the other 6 252 planets stay on the snapshot they were built from, and carries
`imaged: true` on the matching records. exoplanets.json changes by that field on 102 records and
nothing else (compared record by record). Their cards now end "Not an observation — it has been
imaged only as a point of light beside its star, and no map of it exists."; the rest keep "no
image of this world exists". The provenance comment and the texture catalogue's comment say which
is which.

Checked live on :4301: HR 8799 b and eps Ind A b carry the new sentence, Kepler-22 b the old one.

Tests: body-view-model.spec 'says a directly imaged exoplanet was seen as a point of light, not
that no image of it exists'; the old test is renamed 'says an exoplanet the archive does not flag
as imaged has no image'. Unit controls, each failing that test only (1 failed, 840 passed): the
provenance ignoring the flag; the view model dropping it. build.ts now requires at least 95
imaged planets (measured 102); control, the full ETL with the join made on the host's name
instead of the planet's, fails with "Only 0 exoplanets are marked as imaged".

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
This commit is contained in:
2026-09-29 21:50:04 +02:00
co-authored by Claude Opus 5.5
parent c45d9160e3
commit 48fd6fd0e5
9 changed files with 49 additions and 7 deletions
+5
View File
@@ -12,6 +12,11 @@ export interface ExoplanetRecord {
radiusEarth?: number;
massEarth?: number;
discoveryYear?: number;
/**
* True where the archive flags the planet as detected by imaging (`ima_flag`): photographed as a
* point of light beside its star, as HR 8799's four planets were. Absent for every other planet.
*/
imaged?: true;
/**
* Measured orbital period in days (`pl_orbper`). Together with the semi-major axis this
* pins the host star's gravitational parameter exactly, so the planet can be propagated at