A Model Context Protocol Server for Astrophysical RAG:\\ Unified Access to HI, Dwarf, Globular Cluster, IntZ, and ALPINE\\ Kinematic Corpora with FAISS Semantic Search
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.
Authors
- David A. Flynn (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2768-6650)
Publication Details
- Journal
- Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
- Published
- 2026-09-12
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.22720781
- Primary Topic
- Time Series Analysis and Forecasting
- Type
- preprint