InterSystems Employee Programming Challenge #1 Employees only

Registration Ends: 26 Jul, 2026, 11:59:59 PM EST
Task
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Using the publicly available Gaia DR3 epoch photometry archives, identify astronomical objects whose characteristics BP or RP changed by more than 100% over the observation period and generate a list of results.
Description of the columns of Gaia DR3 epoch photometry files available in Gaia documentation.
💡 Update: Based on feedback from early participants, we have defined a standard benchmark dataset for the challenge. All submissions should process only the first 20 files from the Gaia DR3 epoch photometry archive: EpochPhotometry_000000-003111.* through EpochPhotometry_020985-021233.*

Steps to make:
For each source_id:

  1. Process the bp_flux and rp_flux arrays
  2. Ignore missing, null, NaN, or otherwise invalid flux values
  3. Calculate the minimum (min_flux) and maximum (max_flux) valid flux values for both BP and RP bands across all valid observations
  4. Calculate the percentage change using the following formula for each band (BP and RP):
    Percentage change = ((max_flux − min_flux) / min_flux) × 100
  5. Choose the biggest value of the two as resulting percentage_change

The output must include the following data for each astronomical object that satisfies the criteria (calculated percentage change is greater than 100%):

  • source_id
  • bp_min_flux
  • bp_max_flux
  • rp_min_flux
  • rp_max_flux
  • percentage_change
7 Registered Application(s)