A Model Context Protocol Server for Astrophysical RAG:\\ Unified Access to HI, Dwarf, Globular Cluster, IntZ, and ALPINE\\ Kinematic Corpora with FAISS Semantic Search
Year: 2026
Type: preprint
Abstract: We present the EPS Research Astro-RAG MCP Server v2.3.0, a cross-platformModel Context Protocol (MCP) implementation providing unified, machine-readableaccess to five astrophysical corpora spanning the local universe (z = 0) to z = 5.68(the high-redshift frontier of the ALPINE survey). The server exposes a human-readable browser query interface, a REST API, and an LLM-native MCP endpoint,enabling deterministic retrieval, metadata filtering, and structured analysis across2,064 objects: galaxies spanning HI rotation curve surveys, dwarf and irregular sys-tems, and high-redshift kinematic targets, together with Milky Way globular clus-ters. Version 2.3.0 introduces FAISS-accelerated natural-language similarity searchusing pre-built 384-dimensional MiniLM-L6-v2 vector indexes, enabling corpus-widesemantic queries without fine-tuning or API keys. We describe the server architec-ture, unified schema design, FAISS index construction pipeline, MCP toolset, andcross-epoch use cases including rotation-curve retrieval, metadata filtering, and se-mantic similarity exploration. The server is publicly deployed on HuggingFace Spaces(https://dflynn5656-astro-rag-mcp.hf.space), released under the MIT License,and fully reproducible from Zenodo (DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.21154451). The full plat-form is available at https://github.com/eps-research/rag-corpus-series.
Author: Flynn, David, C.
Language: English
Subfield: Astronomy and Astrophysics
Field: Physics and Astronomy
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7212377581
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