⚠ In development — prototype · Project management and author: Adrien Normier (with grateful acknowledgment to Jonathan Justman and V. Nakache for help in the project's earliest steps) · Ontological development grounded in the works of the Cosmic Footprint Society (2024 ISSI Forum on Cosmic Footprint) · The databases belong to their owners · Licence: SSR-GPL v2.0 · CFS public-interest grant
Disclaimers. This is a non-normative effort: we do not claim that the effects shown are good or bad. We do not hold responsibility for the accuracy of the aggregated databases; despite our best efforts, some errors may remain. Not for use for celestial navigation.
A 4D visualization and data registry rendering humanity's presence in space within its natural setting — one continuous interactive scene spanning more than twenty orders of magnitude in space and the full depth of cosmic time. Its purpose is to provide contextual awareness of what humanity does, by placing it in the setting where it happens: the natural cosmos, rendered at the same scale, in the same frame, at the same time.
Every record carries two orthogonal tags: provenance (how the value came to be: RAW measured · PROCESSED derived · MODELLED · SYNTHETIC · VISUAL) and origin (NATURAL · ARTIFICIAL · MIXED). Estimated content always reads as estimated: synthetic and fitted renditions render dimmed/translucent, and every factory-estimated parameter is listed per object, with its method.
As an experiment, and with no claim to authority, every human-made object is given a provisional classification along two axes. We follow the ordinary causal-chain way of thinking used in environmental assessment on Earth (loosely: a source, a pathway, a receiver), applied here as a convenience for sorting and filtering — not as a settled or validated taxonomy. We may well have some of it wrong; corrections are welcome.
containment:mission,
containment:biotope, containment:uncontained.engineered-object · fragment (debris,
spent stages) · effluent ·
biological · electromagnetic (signals)
· energetic (nuclear) · kinetic
(impacts). Filter with vector:fragment, etc.governmental · commercial ·
scientific · military. This is a coarse
join from each object's operating organisation as recorded in GCAT's
orgs table (its own Class code), so it inherits
that table's gaps and simplifications — an object whose operator is
unlisted is simply left unclassified rather than guessed. Filter with
originator:commercial, etc.The tag is a derived, provisional heuristic, computed from each object's kind, origin, host body and emission — nothing is invented, and an object with insufficient data is left unclassified rather than guessed. It is deliberately non-normative: it tries to record a physical fact, never to judge whether a footprint is good or bad. Treat every label as a first attempt, open to revision. A further axis (a maturity flag) may be added later, and only where the underlying data is solid enough to support it.
Methodologically this borrows, humbly, from the standard environmental-assessment chain (Source–Pathway–Receptor, Holdgate 1979; the DPSIR indicator family, OECD/EEA; Elliott et al. 2017). The mapping to space objects is our own tentative interpretation and carries no external endorsement.
Three circular buttons at the bottom-left switch the whole scene between the three Cosmic Footprint categories: material · electromagnetic · biological. On a first visit only the material gate is open, so a newcomer meets the things they already know how to recognise — spacecraft, upper stages, components, exhaust and the marks a physical arrival leaves — and opens the other two when they want them.
A gate hides; it never deletes. Everything behind a shut gate stays in the registry, keeps its record, stays findable by name in search, and travels in a shared link. A shut gate is drawn as a struck, dimmed circle and the count of what it is holding back is printed underneath it: hiding a control is a layout decision, but hiding that the scene is filtered would be a lie of omission. That count is how many objects the shut categories hold in the registry, not how many would be on screen at this instant — the drawn subset is smaller, and it changes as the clock moves.
Each gate is a query, not a hand-written list. The gates are derived
from the footprint vector of the classification above (the carrier the
object is), so a newly ingested catalogue falls into the right gate
without anyone editing a list: material takes
engineered-object · fragment · effluent · physical · kinetic,
electromagnetic takes electromagnetic · energetic,
and biological takes biological. The eight vectors are split across
the three gates exactly once each, with none left over.
Two consequences worth stating plainly. A nuclear detonation is
carried by the energetic vector — which our classification
assigns for its electromagnetic pulse — so detonations sit behind the
electromagnetic gate and are hidden until it is opened. And the gates act on the
human footprint only: natural objects, and natural emission such as a
pulsar's beam, are the setting rather than a footprint, and are never gated.
Communication links sit under the electromagnetic gate. Their own switch is on by default, so opening the electromagnetic gate reveals the spacecraft ↔ ground link lines without having to find the switch first — and turning the switch off keeps them off when the gate opens.
The gate state travels in a shared link as cf (see the URL
parameter table), and a connected AI reaches the same three doors through
footprint-material, footprint-electromagnetic and
footprint-biological.
Epistemic transparency (a guiding principle) means a value is only as good as its uncertainty, so every measured or derived parameter can carry its 1-sigma error bar. The method is deliberately simple and generic, following standard science-display practice:
sigma
side-map — 1-sigma absolute uncertainties keyed by the
field they qualify (orbital.a, tagged.radius,
…), in the value's own units. A side-map (rather than wrapping every
value in a {value, sigma} pair) keeps the rendering hot
path untouched: the error data is read only where confidence is
shown.Today the near-Earth asteroid set carries full orbital + size error
bars from JPL, the exoplanet layer carries the archive's published error
columns (over 10,400 of the ~10,900 exoplanet records hold a 1-sigma bar
on temperature, radius and/or mass), and the bright-star layers
(naked-eye Gaia, Hipparcos, Local Volume galaxies) carry their per-star
or per-galaxy distance uncertainty. More sources and the visual error
bars follow on the same spine. Find carriers with the
has:uncertainty search.
A standing provenance & uncertainty coverage audit
(provenance-audit.json, regenerated by
scripts/audit-provenance.ts) measures the baseline — audit
snapshot of 2026-06-15 (130,479 nodes; the registry has since grown — a
re-run is pending): every parameter's source is documented (100% of nodes,
via the per-layer attribution), while the per-field error-bar coverage
is reported honestly — the orbital + radius σ on the JPL asteroid set, the
exoplanet error columns, the star-layer distance σ — with the remaining
factory-propagation coverage stated as incomplete rather than assumed. A
live per-quantity coverage table (value ⊇ σ ⊇ precision-gate, with the
UNKNOWN remainder kept distinct) is available in the application
(measurement-coverage panel, permalink cv=1). The same file
carries the full per-level parameter inventory.
No privileged center — Sol is a node like any other · time is a dimension (scrub 1940–2060, or far beyond) · continuity, no visual jumps · fluidity over detail · epistemic transparency · the natural setting contextualises the artificial — same scale, same frame, same time · zero server cost (fully static hosting) · extensibility without modification.
Who does what, conceptually. Ingest gets the world's catalogs and normalizes them — it may reshape, never invent. The registry is the arbiter: it reconciles identities across sources (the same spacecraft in three catalogs becomes one object), layers trajectories by quality, validates the result, and bakes ONE deterministic document. The viz turns that document into pixels and gestures — it runs no new physics and asks no external service. The factory is the single licensed maker of values nobody measured: explicit models from published literature (every one listed in the library), deterministic under a seed, and every output labeled estimated where you read it — its functions are inventoried on the factory page. The archive remembers everything append-only, so any past bake can be audited or reproduced. The full engineering specification (coordinate conventions, frame-tree invariants, inter-block contracts) is access-controlled.
Citation policy. Every scientific reference the registry leans on hyperlinks to its DOI (or, where none exists, its authoritative stable archive URL) — a reader reaches the source in one click. The complete, DOI-linked bibliography is the library, organised by class of natural element and by class of anthropogenic effect; each entry notes which registry element it informs. New sources are added there in the same change that introduces them.
Currency. Living catalogs are re-fetched on a scheduled
maintainer-side cadence tuned per source — weekly for the fast movers (GP
element sets, the SATCAT, upcoming launch windows), monthly or quarterly for
the slower catalogs (never by your browser — the site stays a static,
deterministic bake): each refresh lands as a dated, append-only snapshot in a
review proposal that headlines any rows removed upstream, and only the
maintainer's review merges it — previous snapshots are never deleted.
Deletion retention. For the catalog sources (GCAT object catalogs ·
CelesTrak SATCAT · UNOOSA index · exoplanets), a row deleted upstream does not
silently vanish from the next bake: the bake unions prior snapshots' rows back
in and labels each such record upstreamRemoved:<last-seen-date>
(for a name-keyed catalog the label honestly reads "removed or renamed" —
the data cannot distinguish). Point-in-time feeds (GP element sets, DSN fixes,
DONKI event windows, rolling upcoming-launch lists) are deliberately excluded:
absence from the next fetch is their nature, not a deletion.
The cosmos as it is without us — the stage every artificial object is measured against.
| Layer | Content | Authority / citation | License / terms |
|---|---|---|---|
| Solar system | Sol, 8 planets, 7 dwarfs, 22 moons; IAU spin states; moon orbital planes/phases are real J2000 osculating elements. The Moon is tidally locked, and now says so in the geometry: it carries the IAU/NAIF Mean Earth/Polar Axis rotation (W = 38.3213° + 13.17635815°/day) and orbits at the measured sidereal month, so its near side faces Earth at every epoch — the sub-Earth longitude holds inside the ±8° optical-libration band from 1900 to 2150, where before it swept the whole ±180°. That frame is the one every lunar coordinate here is published in, so the correction rotates the 9,086 lunar Gazetteer features, the 20 impact sites, the 694 Apollo surface items and the 101 landed craft together, rigidly. Declined with measured magnitudes: the 13 nutation terms in W (≤0.053°, because the matching pole terms cancel them), the 18.6-year Cassini precession of the pole (≤3.1°), the Mean-Earth↔principal-axis difference (~0.03°) | Standish (1992) mean elements · JPL Solar System Dynamics · JPL Horizons (moon i/Ω/ω/M₀, J2000) · IAU rotation reports (Archinal et al. 2011/2018) via NASA/NAIF pck00011.tpc | Public-domain U.S. government data; NAIF kernels “may be downloaded and used by anyone”; cited per record |
| Local universe | CMB/Local Group/Milky Way anchors, M31 · M33 · LMC · SMC with observed disc orientations, 11 nearest/brightest named stars — each anchor star carries its MEASURED space velocity (proper motion + radial velocity read from the committed Gaia DR3 / Hipparcos / XHIP snapshots, converted through the one cited solar-motion convention; a star with no admissible RV keeps an honest tangential-only drift, stated per record) | Gaia DR3 / Hipparcos parallaxes & proper motions · XHIP radial velocities (Anderson & Francis 2012, q_RV 'D' excluded) · NED distance compilations · Planck 2018 dipole · RC3 (de Vaucouleurs+ 1991) disc PA+i · IAU galactic frame per the Hipparcos catalogue (ESA SP-1200, Vol 1 §1.5.3) | Public catalogs; per-record citations in each object's notes |
| IAU star names | 451 official proper names (WGSN) reconciled onto the star layers by sky direction with a triple identity gate (6′ position · uniqueness · magnitude agreement), magnitude tie-breaking arbitrating close pairs and Bayer-designation rows renamed to their proper names: 419 of the 451 names attach (Sirius A, Canopus, Vega, Rigel, Aldebaran, Porrima, Alcor, Deneb Algedi…); the remaining 32 stay honestly unmatched or ambiguous rather than forced | IAU Division C Working Group on Star Names — IAU-CSN, snapshot 2026-06-11 | IAU — CC BY 4.0 |
| Exoplanets | 4,685 host stars + 6,257 planets. Cross-joined to Gaia DR3 by sky position: a host coinciding with a Gaia star (within 0.3 pc) is deduplicated (the Gaia duplicate is dropped, not double-counted), and Gaia's independent effective temperature is reconciled onto the host — kept as a corroborating source when it agrees, a selectable alternate when it disagrees (ERASE NONE) | NASA Exoplanet Archive, pscomppars table (IPAC/Caltech, under contract with NASA) | Public; "This research has made use of the NASA Exoplanet Archive" — snapshot 2026-06-10 |
| Hazardous asteroids (PHA) | 2,547 Potentially Hazardous Asteroids incl. 99942 Apophis — heliocentric osculating elements at per-row epoch; radius only where a diameter is measured (340). Each object also carries the orbit solution behind those elements, on its record: who determined it (2,511 by JPL's automated pipeline, 32 by J. Giorgini, 3 by D. Farnocchia, 1 by S. Chesley — so 98.6% of these orbits are automated fits, which is worth knowing), how many observations were used and how many were radar, the arc they span with first and last observation dates, the normalised residual RMS, and the Minor Planet Center's uncertainty parameter U (0–9). All 2,547 rows carry all of it, from the same API response as the elements. U is shown with the in-orbit longitude runoff band it denotes, derived from the MPC's own published definition rather than transcribed — 1,751 objects sit at U=0 (under 1″ per decade) but 796 are at U≥1 and 52 at U=9 (≥41° per decade: (1979 XB), for instance, rests on 18 observations over a four-day arc in 1979). The MPC states that "the U value should not be used as a predictor for the uncertainty in the future motion of NEAs" — it classifies the solution, not the future, and the layer card repeats that. Search the text MPC U= | NASA/JPL Small-Body Database (SBDB) Query API — snapshot 2026-07-29; MPC U definition: minorplanetcenter.net/iau/info/UValue.html | Public domain (U.S. Government work, NASA/JPL-Caltech) — verified at fetch against ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/about, which asserts no terms and asks only to be cited; the fetcher refuses to save a snapshot if that statement has gone |
| Comets | 1,417 bound periodic comets — 1P/Halley, 2P/Encke, Hale-Bopp and the rest of the well-constrained closed-orbit population (semi-major axis within the outer-solar-system/scattered-disc scale, a ≤ 500 AU) — each on its real heliocentric osculating orbit at the row's own epoch (Halley's retrograde 162° inclination preserved). Hyperbolic, parabolic, and near-parabolic single-apparition Oort-cloud comets (2,651 rows) are EXCLUDED, not forced onto an invented orbit (A5). Radius only where SBDB measures a nucleus diameter (104). Each comet also carries its JPL orbit solution (observations, arc, residual RMS, producer) exactly as the asteroid layer does — all 1,417 of them. Only 1,128 carry an MPC U value, and the gap is deliberate: long-period comets are classified by MPC orbit QUALITY codes (1A, 2B — Marsden et al. 1978) on an entirely different scale, so those cells are left empty and counted rather than mapped onto U. On 70 of the 1,417, JPL declares that it used a low-precision TWO-BODY dynamic model — the same approximation this registry makes, so there the record says so rather than implying more: 34D/Gale, for one, rests on 47 observations whose last is known only to the year, 1938. Where a source publishes a date to the year alone it is kept that way, never completed to a day. Search kind:comet | NASA/JPL Small-Body Database (SBDB) Query API, sb-kind=c — snapshot 2026-07-29 | Public domain (U.S. Government work, NASA/JPL-Caltech) |
| Orbit covariance — what we deliberately do NOT carry | JPL publishes a full orbit covariance matrix per small body, and this registry does not ingest it. The reason is a measurement, not a preference, and it is recorded here so the decision can be checked rather than trusted. (a) It is not in the bulk response we snapshot: it lives on the single-object sbdb.api endpoint, one request per object — about 4,000 requests, not "the same response". (b) Its epoch is not our epoch. The covariance is stated at the epoch of the orbit SOLUTION while the elements are served at the current osculating epoch. Measured over a 45-object sample of this very PHA population, they differed on 43 of 45, by a median of 2,994 days — over eight years. Carrying a correlated uncertainty across that gap needs the state-transition matrix of JPL's own force model (DE441, SB441-N16, per-object non-gravitational terms), which this registry does not have; a correlated uncertainty transported wrongly is a numerical falsehood, so it is not transported at all. (c) It is expressed in a different element set (cometary e, q, tp, node, peri, i against our Keplerian a, e, i, Ω, ω, M₀) and is of variable rank — 43 of the 45 sampled are 6×6, 2 are 7×7, and bodies with fitted non-gravitational terms run to 8×8 (Apophis, Bennu), 9×9 (1P/Halley) and 13×13 (C/2013 A1, a rotating-jet model). (d) Verbatim it would add 6.49 MiB to the download — about a tenth of the whole registry — for a quantity no part of the product could honestly evaluate at the epoch we render. The related not_valid_before / not_valid_after fields are skipped for a blunter reason: they are null on every object measured, Apophis included. The staleness question they would answer is answered instead by the observation arc and last-observation date, which are really there. What we carry today is the diagonal 1σ per element; expressing a correlated uncertainty remains an open limitation of this registry, stated rather than hidden | Probed 2026-07-29 against ssd-api.jpl.nasa.gov/doc/sbdb and the bulk field list (sbdb_query.api?info=field, 52 orbit fields, no covariance column) | Public domain (U.S. Government work, NASA/JPL-Caltech) — the licence is not the obstacle here; the epoch is |
| Planetary satellites (moons & moonlets) | 437 known moons of Mars→Pluto beyond the 22 curated majors — Jupiter's irregulars, Saturn's 280+ moonlets, the small moons of Uranus, Neptune and Pluto — each on its real mean-element orbit under its planet. JPL publishes each row's elements referred to the local Laplace plane (pole given), the planet's equator, or the ecliptic; all are rotated into the shared J2000 ecliptic frame (conversion verified against JPL Horizons osculating angles for Phobos, Io, Triton, Ariel and Charon). Mean elements at epoch: nodal/apsidal precession is not modelled (stated per node). Mean radius only where JPL publishes one (24); the rest render as points, no invented radii (A5). The 22 rows matching curated majors are not discarded: their a/e/i + radius reconcile onto the curated moons as corroborating/alternate sources (erase none — e.g. the Moon's JPL elements corroborate, Io's eccentricity is a kept alternate). Search kind:moon | JPL Solar System Dynamics — Planetary Satellite Mean Elements + Physical Parameters, ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/sats/elem — snapshot 2026-07-10; equatorial-frame reference poles per Archinal et al. 2018, IAU WGCCRE (10.1007/s10569-017-9805-5) | Public domain (U.S. Government work, NASA/JPL-Caltech) |
| NEOWISE diameters & albedos (join) | 143,318 thermal-model (NEATM) diameter/albedo records joined onto the PHA layer by JPL designation: 295 matches — 1 fills a small body that had no measured radius yet, 258 CORROBORATE (agree with, within tolerance) SBDB's own measured diameter, kept alongside it as an additional confirming source, and 36 DISAGREE, kept as a selectable alternate (ERASE NONE — the registry never overwrites a value, every source is retained; see the object's provenance chain). An annotation/upgrade layer: adds no objects of its own | NASA/IPAC Infrared Science Archive (IRSA), neowisesbpropv2 catalog — WISE/NEOWISE mission (JPL/Caltech); cite Wright et al. 2010 (10.1088/0004-6256/140/6/1868), Mainzer et al. 2011 (10.1088/0004-637X/731/1/53), Mainzer et al. 2014 (10.1088/0004-637X/792/1/30) — snapshot 2026-07-01 | Public NASA/IPAC archive data; reuse with the acknowledgement above |
| Sentry impact risk (join) | The NASA/JPL Sentry-II impact-monitoring system's OWN published statements, joined onto the PHA layer by JPL designation (annotation-only, adds no objects, computes no probability of its own — held deliberately apart from the PHA orbit-class facet, which is a different catalogue's different criterion). THREE-VALUED: 15 PHAs are ON the current risk list and carry Sentry's cumulative impact probability, potential-impact count and year range, and Palermo/Torino scales, verbatim-close in Sentry's terms (101955 Bennu: 5.7×10⁻⁴ across 157 potential impacts 2178–2290; 29075/1950 DA); 870 PHAs are on the REMOVED table and carry the removal date with the source's own semantics — "objects are removed when all previous potential impacts are eliminated", typically by further observations (99942 Apophis, removed 2021-02-21: retired risk, stated); the 2,159 risk-list objects with no node here are counted (most sit below the PHA size cut), and a PHA absent from both tables carries NOTHING — absence is never presented as "probability zero" | NASA/JPL SSD/CNEOS Sentry Data API v2.0 (Sentry-II: Roa et al. 2021, 10.3847/1538-3881/ac193f) — snapshot 2026-07-28, risk list + removed table | Public domain (U.S. Government work, NASA/JPL-Caltech); SSD requests a download acknowledgement |
| Nuclear power sources carried on board (join) | Which space objects carry nuclear material, and of which of the three very different kinds — a fission REACTOR (tens of kilowatts thermal, with a fuel core to dispose of), a radioisotope THERMOELECTRIC GENERATOR (tens of watts electric), or a radioisotope HEATER UNIT (grams of decay heat). Nothing to do with the nuclear-detonations layer, which is terrestrial explosions. Annotation-only: adds no objects. TWO AUTHORITIES, kept apart. (1) The UN register, read from its own remarks — 57 objects: 29 reactors (the RORSAT class; each states its disposal, and the register's own estimate is that the bodies stay in orbit 400–2,310 years and the ejected fuel cores 2,020–3,340 years), 4 radioisotope heater units, 1 named RTG pair, and 24 declarations that say only “a nuclear power source”. THOSE 24 STAY UNSPECIFIED ON PURPOSE: in UN usage that phrase is a genus covering reactors and generators alike, so calling them RTGs would be inventing a species from a genus, however guessable the answer. Each declaration carries the rung of authority it rests on — a State's own notification under the NPS Principles (8), the UN register (33), or UNOOSA's secondary compilation (17) — and the sentence it was read from. (2) NASA's RPS programme, which names the DEVICE the register does not: 23 missions with model and unit counts (29 generators, 298 heater units). Where they overlap (19 objects) both statements are kept, never merged. Apollo 11 is recorded as a stated DISAGREEMENT between the two. Absence is UNKNOWN — no source lists the objects that carry nothing | UN Online Index of Objects Launched into Outer Space + the Principles Relevant to the Use of Nuclear Power Sources in Outer Space (UNGA res. 47/68, 1992); NASA/DOE Radioisotope Power Systems Program, snapshot 2026-07-30 | © United Nations, reused under the UN terms of use; NASA Images and Media Usage Guidelines (factual use, NASA acknowledged — insignia and logotype excluded) |
| On-board autonomy — and why it is not a “has AI” flag | Whether a vehicle decides anything for itself, and WHAT KIND of decision. A boolean was refused: “AI” has meant symbolic reasoning, then expert systems, then machine learning, then large models, so one flag would mean different things at the two ends of a registry that spans 1957 to now. Instead the facet applies a written frontier — does the vehicle make, ON BOARD, without a human in the loop, a decision that COULD HAVE GONE OTHERWISE, from data it acquired itself? — and names the REGIME: navigating itself, re-planning its own activities, deciding which of its data matters, choosing its own targets, locating itself by matching the terrain it sees, picking its own landing point, driving itself, flying itself, or learning aboard. The frontier's cost is stated rather than hidden: attitude control, Kalman filtering, safe-mode entry, stored sequences and even neural image compression are all OUTSIDE it, because none of them chooses; a 1998 rule-based planner is INSIDE it. The line is about where and when the choice is made, not how sophisticated the method is. 14 records over 10 objects (Deep Space 1, Stardust, Deep Impact, Earth Observing 1, Opportunity, Curiosity, Perseverance, Ingenuity, OSIRIS-REx, Hayabusa2), each with a verified DOI. Two regimes are declared and deliberately EMPTY, and 6 further systems we believe flew are DECLINED for want of a citation that could be verified — both counts are published, because absence here means “nobody has documented it”, never “it decides nothing”. Coverage is biased toward missions whose autonomy is published in English, and any census drawn from this layer inherits that bias | Peer-reviewed and conference literature, one citation per record — Muscettola 1998; Bhaskaran 2000, 2012; Rayman 2000; Chien 2005; Estlin 2012; Lorenz 2017; Francis 2017; Balaram 2018; Nelessen 2019; Terui 2020 (DOIs in the library) | Facts cited from the published literature; the classification and its frontier are the registry's own, tentative and open to revision |
| Gaia DR3 | Stars within 50 pc (distance precision < 1%), full 3D space velocities where radial velocity exists — expressed in the galactic rest frame via the cited solar motion (vc 229 km/s, Eilers et al. 2019 + (U,V,W)⊙, Schönrich et al. 2010). Deduplicated against BOTH the curated named stars and the exoplanet hosts (a Gaia row within 0.3 pc of either is dropped so a host is never double-counted); each such deduplicated star's effective temperature corroborates its matched exoplanet host (kept as corr/alt — erase none), and a row dropped near exactly ONE curated named star reconciles its Gaia distance + temperature onto that star the same way (Sirius A, Barnard's Star… — the α Cen/Proxima triple is honestly skipped as positionally ambiguous) | ESA / Gaia / DPAC — Gaia Data Release 3 | ESA Gaia data credit policy (free use with credit) — snapshot 2026-06-10 |
| Gaia DR3 — naked-eye bright sky | The familiar bright sky: every Gaia DR3 star of G ≤ 7 (the naked-eye limit with margin) at ALL distances — Orion's belt, Canopus, Betelgeuse and the rest that the 50 pc cut misses. The distance-precision gate is DELIBERATELY relaxed for this layer (a naked-eye star with a poor parallax still belongs in the sky): a star is placed at 1/parallax only when its parallax exceeds 3σ, and the per-star distance uncertainty is carried honestly (σ_d in the record's uncertainty side-map + a σ_d/d note); rows without a usable parallax — including some of the very brightest, saturated in Gaia — are EXCLUDED, never placed at an invented distance. Deduplicated by source_id against the ≤50 pc layer and positionally (0.3 pc) against the curated named stars and the exoplanet hosts (unambiguous matches corroborate the host's temperature, erase none). Its own gaia-bright layer, so each Gaia layer card states its own precision gate | ESA / Gaia / DPAC — Gaia Data Release 3 | ESA Gaia data credit policy (free use with credit) — snapshot 2026-07-10 |
| Hipparcos — the brightest stars | the ~150 BRIGHTEST stars in the sky (Sirius, Canopus, Vega, Rigel, Betelgeuse…) that Gaia DR3 saturates on (no usable parallax at G ≲ 3, so the naked-eye layer honestly lacked them): the Hipparcos main catalogue (ESA 1997) subset at Vmag ≤ 4, placed at its measured trigonometric parallax (> 3σ gate, per-star σ_d carried). Effective temperature is DERIVED from B−V via the published Ballesteros 2012 relation and labelled per record — never passed off as a catalogued value. Each star’s drift carries a MEASURED radial velocity from the XHIP compilation (Anderson & Francis 2012, joined by exact HIP number, σ_RV noted) — full 3-D space velocities for all 148. Deduplicated against every star population already ingested by direction + distance + BRIGHTNESS (the magnitude condition keeps binaries honest — without it Rigel would be erased against its 12-mag companion Rigel B). Its own hipparcos-bright layer; IAU proper names attach through the same positional name join as every star layer | ESA — Hipparcos main catalogue (SP-1200, 1997), via CDS/VizieR I/239/hip_main; teff relation Ballesteros 2012 (10.1209/0295-5075/97/34008) | ESA mission data — free use with attribution — snapshot 2026-07-10 |
| XHIP distances — naked-eye completeness | The V ≤ 6.5 naked-eye stars the registry’s parallax honesty gates refuse — the junk-ORIGINAL-parallax luminous supergiants (Deneb: I/239 Plx 1.01 ± 0.57 fails 3σ; Alnilam…) — placed at the XHIP compiled heliocentric distance: the HIP2 New-Reduction parallax (van Leeuwen 2007) with the catalogue’s own statistical correction where a σ is published (carried per star as σ_d), else a cluster-membership fit labelled MODELLED with NO invented σ; a star with no XHIP distance (Aludra) stays honestly absent. Effective temperature DERIVED from B−V (Ballesteros 2012, labelled); measured XHIP radial velocities joined by exact HIP number (quality grade D — “no error available or other serious problems” — excluded). Deduplicated by exact HIP + the 6′ direction+magnitude identity gate against every star layer. Its own xhip layer. PLUS the RADIAL-VELOCITY EXTENSION over the whole sky: the same 46k-row XHIP compilation joined POSITIONALLY (6′ + magnitude gate, ambiguity honestly skipped) onto every star still carrying a tangential-only drift — thousands more stars gain full 3-D space velocities, each note naming the mechanism ([XHIP, positional]) | Anderson & Francis 2012, AstL 38, 331 — XHIP, Extended Hipparcos Compilation (10.1134/S1063773712050015), via CDS/VizieR V/137D; teff relation Ballesteros 2012 (10.1209/0295-5075/97/34008) | Published compilation via CDS/VizieR — free use with attribution — snapshot 2026-07-20 |
| Reference pulsars | 3 pulsars (Crab, Vela, PSR B1919+21) as natural EM beacons, described in the same emission language as human transmissions — their natural context | ATNF pulsar catalogue | Factual public data; per-record notes |
| ATNF Pulsar Catalogue | 4,178 rotation-powered neutron stars (pulsars) placed in the Milky Way galactic frame, distance-gated — only pulsars with a catalogued distance are shown; ~140 without one are excluded rather than guessed (A5). The full catalogue as its own atnf layer, distinct from the 3 curated reference pulsars. Search kind:pulsar | Manchester, Hobbs, Teoh & Hobbs 2005, AJ 129, 1993 (10.1086/428488) · ATNF Pulsar Catalogue, atnf.csiro.au/research/pulsar/psrcat — snapshot 2026-06-24 | Public catalogue; attribution / acknowledgement requested |
| Local Volume galaxies (UNGC) | 864 galaxies of the Local Volume (within ~11 Mpc) — the GALAXY rung above the stellar layers: every named nearby galaxy (Centaurus A, M81, M101, Sculptor, the Andromeda dwarfs…) placed at the catalog’s ADOPTED published distance, the distance METHOD named per record (TRGB · Cepheids · surface-brightness fluctuations · Tully–Fisher · brightest stars · group membership; rows whose only adopted distance is the Hubble flow are labelled redshift-derived). The published distance ERROR is carried as σ_d where the paper’s own distance-measurement table lists one (298 records). 4D honesty (A5): a galaxy’s RADIAL velocity is measured (heliocentric + Local-Group-frame values in the record) but its tangential motion is UNMEASURED — no drift is modelled, positions are epoch positions. Parentage is gravitational (A1): the 69 galaxies within 1.0 Mpc — the measured Local Group zero-velocity radius R0 = 0.96 ± 0.03 Mpc (Karachentsev et al. 2009), a declared heuristic — join the Local Group anchor and co-move with its CMB-dipole flow; the other 795 are field galaxies in the CMB rest frame. The curated M31/M33/LMC/SMC + the catalog’s own Milky Way row keep their curated identities (name + major-galaxy position dedup; M31’s dwarf companions like M32/NGC 205 are preserved). Search kind:galaxy | Karachentsev, Makarov & Kaisina 2013, AJ 145, 101 (10.1088/0004-6256/145/4/101), via CDS/VizieR J/AJ/145/101; LG zero-velocity radius Karachentsev et al. 2009 (10.1111/j.1365-2966.2008.14300.x) — snapshot 2026-07-14 | CDS/VizieR published-compilation data — free use with attribution (cite the paper + CDS) |
| Galaxy clusters (Planck PSZ2) | 1,094 galaxy clusters from the second Planck Sunyaev-Zel'dovich source catalogue — every PSZ2 detection with a measured redshift, placed in the CMB rest frame at its line-of-sight comoving distance. Placement honesty (A5): the catalogue measures sky positions and REDSHIFTS, never distances — the z → distance conversion goes through one cited flat-ΛCDM door (Planck 2018 parameters) and is labelled MODELLED per record; the 559 detections without a redshift are EXCLUDED, never placed at an invented distance. The SZ-proxy mass M500 is carried with its published 1σ where given; no radius is invented and no drift is attached (cosmological recession is the expansion of space, not motion through it). Search kind:cluster | Planck Collaboration 2016, A&A 594, A27 (10.1051/0004-6361/201525823), via CDS/VizieR J/A+A/594/A27 — snapshot 2026-07-14 | ESA Planck mission data via CDS/VizieR — free use with attribution (cite the paper + CDS) |
| Largest structures (curated) | 14 cited landmarks at the scales ABOVE galaxy clusters — the Virgo (Local), Laniakea, Perseus-Pisces and Shapley superclusters, the CfA2 / Sloan / South Pole / Hercules-Corona Borealis great walls, the Boötes / Local / KBC voids, the Great Attractor region, the Pisces-Cetus supercluster complex and the Huge-LQG quasar group. A small, strictly-cited set: each structure is placed at a CATALOGUED centroid/anchor (each record says which); published redshifts / recession velocities convert through the same cited ΛCDM door and are labelled MODELLED, while a directly cited distance is used verbatim; walls and voids get NO invented shape or radius (sizes stay in the notes in the papers' own units); a structure whose published localization is a region carries an explicitly INDICATIVE direction, and the one contested structure is shown WITH its published rebuttal. Search kind:structure | Published astronomy, one citation per structure (e.g. Tully et al. 2014 — Laniakea, 10.1038/nature13674; Geller & Huchra 1989 — the CfA2 Great Wall, 10.1126/science.246.4932.897) — the full per-row DOI list is in the library | Public astronomical facts (positions/redshifts/classes); per-record citation |
| Gravitational-wave events | 2 confirmed compact-binary mergers — GW150914 (the first direct detection, a binary black hole) and GW170817 (the first binary neutron-star merger, with an electromagnetic counterpart) — each rendered as a disturbance expanding outward at the speed of light from its detection instant, the natural-event analogue of the EM emission shell. A deliberately small, strictly-cited set; sky-localization centroids are representative directions within large credible regions, not precise source points (declared per record). Search kind:gw-event | Abbott et al. 2016 (GW150914, 10.1103/PhysRevLett.116.061102) · Abbott et al. 2017 (GW170817, 10.1103/PhysRevLett.119.161101) · the GWTC catalogue via the Gravitational Wave Open Science Center (GWOSC) | Public record; GWOSC strain data CC0 |
| Gravitational-wave events (GWOSC full catalogue) | 394 confirmed compact-binary mergers (the full GWTC-1 through latest-O4 CONFIDENT list, beyond the two curated ones) as its own gwosc layer, each an expanding shell at c from its detection epoch. Only confident-catalogue events are kept — marginal / independent-analysis / external-trigger / hardware-injection entries are dropped (A5). GWOSC publishes no point sky position, so each event's DIRECTION is a deterministic seeded placeholder (labelled display-only), placed at the real published median luminosity distance (285 events; the rest, mostly newest O4, carry no published distance and sit at a flagged nominal distance). Search kind:gw-event | Gravitational-Wave Open Science Center (LIGO/Virgo/KAGRA), event API — GWTC-1 (10.1103/PhysRevX.9.031040), GWTC-2 (10.1103/PhysRevX.11.021053), GWTC-3 (10.1103/PhysRevX.13.041039), GWOSC software (10.1016/j.softx.2021.100658) — snapshot 2026-07-01 | CC0 / public domain; acknowledgement requested |
| Supernovae (historical + landmark) | 9 supernovae humanity has actually witnessed — the naked-eye Galactic events across a millennium (SN 185 · SN 1006, the brightest recorded · SN 1054, the Crab · SN 1181 · SN 1572, Tycho's · SN 1604, Kepler's · Cassiopeia A) plus the two extragalactic landmarks (SN 1885A in Andromeda, the first seen in another galaxy; SN 1987A in the LMC, the first with a neutrino detection). Each is a point placed in the galactic frame at its catalogued distance, appearing in TIME at its observed peak (A2 — rewind before 1054 and the Crab has not yet exploded). A deliberately small, strictly-cited, fact-only set; SN 386/393 and the large modern extragalactic catalogues are omitted (A5). An optional LIGHT-SHELL overlay (kill switch sn=1) draws each event's photon front — at Earth's distance at the observed peak, expanding at c thereafter (a geometric c·Δt construction from the cited date + distance; scrub to 1054 and the Crab's front reaches Earth). Search kind:supernova | Published astronomy — Williams et al. 2011 (10.1088/2041-8205/732/1/L11), Winkler et al. 2003 (10.1086/375314), Hester 2008 (10.1146/annurev.astro.45.051806.110608), Ritter et al. 2021 (10.3847/2041-8213/ac2edf), Krause et al. 2008 (10.1038/nature07608), Reynolds et al. 2007 (10.1086/510515), Perets et al. 2011 (10.1086/504413), Arnett et al. 1989 (10.1146/annurev.aa.27.090189.003213) | Public astronomical facts (positions/dates/types/distances) |
| Naked-eye deep-sky objects (curated) | 31 classical deep-sky objects visible to the unaided eye — the Messier-class set: 20 open clusters (Pleiades M45 · Hyades · Beehive M44 · Ptolemy M7 · the Perseus Double Cluster · NGC 6231 · the Jewel Box …), 9 globular clusters (ω Centauri · 47 Tucanae · M13 · M22 · M4 …) and 2 great nebulae (Orion M42 · Carina NGC 3372). Each is a point under the Milky Way in the galactic frame at its PUBLISHED distance, verbatim from the cited catalogue; open clusters carry the published Gaia DR2 half-members radius (r50) converted exactly to a physical extent at that distance, globulars carry the Harris integrated V but NO size (the queried catalogue publishes none — absent stays absent, A5). Node names carry the M/NGC/IC designation, so the strict sky-culture deep-sky join attaches the published Chinese/Korean names for M 7 · M 44 · M 45 · ω Cen · Carina · NGC 6231 with zero join change. M 31/M 33/LMC/SMC live in the local-universe layer, not here. Search kind:cluster · kind:nebula | Cantat-Gaudin et al. 2020 (10.1051/0004-6361/202038192, Gaia DR2 open-cluster census), Harris 1996 (10.1086/118116, globular-cluster catalogue), Melis et al. 2014 (10.1126/science.1256101, Pleiades VLBI), Menten et al. 2007 (10.1051/0004-6361:20078247, Orion VLBI), Göppl & Preibisch 2022 (10.1051/0004-6361/202142576, Carina Gaia EDR3), Smith 2006 (10.1111/j.1365-2966.2006.10007.x) | Public astronomical facts (positions/distances/sizes/magnitudes), cited per row |
| Constellations (native, per sky culture) | each PUBLISHED sky culture's constellation figures — the 88 IAU western stick figures, the classical Chinese sky (318 figures), Korean (271), H. A. Rey's redrawn western set, Indian, Norse, ancient Egyptian, Japanese moon stations, Sky & Telescope and Hlad western variants — drawn as lines BETWEEN the registry's own real 3-D stars (resolved by the same 6-arcmin + magnitude identity gate as the IAU name join): from Earth the familiar shapes appear; travel anywhere else and they honestly distort, because a constellation is an Earth-perspective overlay on stars at wildly different distances. ANY SUBSET of cultures renders SIMULTANEOUSLY (multi-culture overlay) — a compact Visualisation chips row (off · western · chinese · …; only cultures whose figures actually resolve are offered), each enabled culture drawn in its own deterministic hue (western keeps the classic steel-blue; hues chosen for colour-blind-reasonable spacing over the common overlays — with many simultaneous cultures some hues necessarily approach each other), still ONE pooled draw call; permalink cn=<culture>[+<culture>…] (e.g. cn=western+chinese; legacy cn=1 still reads as western; an unknown member is dropped, an all-unknown value reads as off). OPTIONAL NAMES LEGEND (cnl=1, default OFF): each enabled culture's own figure NAME labels the figure at its on-screen centre (native form where the culture publishes one, the english translation as a fainter suffix; ≤24 labels — the figures nearest the centre of view win, re-elected on a ~2 s heartbeat), and a selected member star shows a "constellations" row naming its figures per enabled culture (a hue dot ties row, label and lines). A figure star with no registry star passing the honesty gates (e.g. a junk-parallax supergiant) is DROPPED with its segments and counted, never faked (A5 — no figure is completed by invention). OFF by default; the line sets lazy-load only when enabled (zero boot cost) | Stellarium sky cultures (stellarium-skycultures), through the registry's default-deny sky-culture governance — Tier-1 historical/scholarly traditions only, each culture's text/data licence re-verified at fetch AND at bake (living-community traditions and no-derivatives cultures are never published as line data); figure stars: ESA Hipparcos/Gaia via CDS/VizieR — snapshot 2026-07-20 | Per-culture (CC BY-SA / GPL, copyleft honoured per slice) — a separable COLLECTION artifact (atlantis-constellations.json, each culture's table under its own licence; supersedes atlantis-constellations-western.json), never part of the SSR-GPL bake |
| Named surface features (IAU Gazetteer of Planetary Nomenclature) | 15,870 officially approved names of natural surface features across 39 bodies the registry carries — every crater, mons, vallis, planitia… the IAU has named, from the Moon's 9,086 (Tycho, Einstein, Sinus Lunicus…) through Olympus Mons on Mars and Maxwell Montes on Venus down to the named boulders of Bennu — each a surface-fixed, co-rotating mark at its published center lat/lon (planetocentric, +East — the export's one declared convention, cross-checked per row), carrying the published diameter as its size and the IAU origin/etymology text. TWO NAME CLASSES, the source's own: 8,807 deliberate proper names and 7,063 systematic lettered designations ("Einstein A" — the Gazetteer's "Satellite Feature" class, kind satellite-feature), kept distinct so approach context can reveal proper names first. Honesty: 216 features of bodies the registry does not carry (Eros, Ida, Gaspra, Dimorphos…) are held out, never given a fabricated host; 312 features without a published diameter carry no size; nothing is generated. Search kind:crater · kind:mons · under:MARS kind:mons | Gazetteer of Planetary Nomenclature — USGS Astrogeology Science Center for the IAU Working Group for Planetary System Nomenclature (planetarynames.wr.usgs.gov), the site's own nightly per-target KML bulk exports — snapshot 2026-07-29 | Public domain — the site's own FAQ, verbatim: "Everything in the Gazetteer of Planetary Nomenclature is in the public domain", with the requested citation form (IAU WGPSN, access date, site URL) |
| Sky-culture star names (Tier-1 cultures) | each PUBLISHED sky culture's own star names joined onto the registry's real stars by the SAME 6-arcmin + magnitude identity gate as the constellation figures — 2,813 registry stars carry cultural names (chinese 3,021 HIP names → 2,812 stars · chinese_contemporary 3,022 → 2,813 · korean 69 → 67 · indian 31 · norse 3 · egyptian 2 · western/Rey 2; unresolved names dropped + counted, never guessed, A5). A selected star shows a compact "sky-culture names" row with the source community + licence attribution per culture. DEEP-SKY NAMES (increment 2): the cultures' non-star name keys join onto the registry's own galaxy/nebula/cluster nodes by EXACT catalogue designation only — M 31, the Andromeda Galaxy, shows its classical Chinese name (奎宿增廿一, Legs Mansion XXI) exactly like a named star. PLANET NAMES (increment 3): the 5 ancient-Egyptian PLANET names join onto the solar-system planets by EXACT planet-name identity ("NAME Jupiter" ↔ the node named exactly Jupiter — identity certain by construction; ≥2 exact carriers would refuse) — Jupiter shows Horus Who Limits the Two Lands, Mars Horus of the Horizon, Mercury Associated with Set (Sebegu), Saturn Horus the Bull of the Sky, Venus God of the Morning. Of the 12 non-star keys in the snapshot, 1 joins as deep-sky + 5 as planets; the rest are counted and never guessed (no registry object carries M 7 / M 44 / M 45 / NGC 5139 / NGC 6231 / NGC 3372 — A5, ambiguity refused). GOVERNANCE (default-deny, registry/skyculture.ts): ONLY Tier-1 historical/scholarly traditions are published; living-community traditions appear as LINK-OUTS only (culture + community + upstream URL, zero name data — the full linked list is on the library page) pending documented community consent; no-derivatives cultures (incl. al-Sufi — its text/data licence is CC BY-ND 4.0) are excluded entirely. Loads lazily on the first star/galaxy/planet selection (zero boot cost) | Stellarium sky cultures (stellarium-skycultures), per-culture licences re-verified at fetch AND at bake — snapshot 2026-07-20; stars: ESA Hipparcos/Gaia via CDS/VizieR | Per-culture (CC BY-SA / GPL, copyleft honoured per slice) — a separable COLLECTION artifact (atlantis-skynames.json), each culture's table under its own licence, never part of the SSR-GPL bake |
| Eclipse shadows (geometric) | the geometric umbra/penumbra of a moon crossing its host body (Moon→Earth solar eclipses, Io’s shadow transiting Jupiter, Earth→Moon during a lunar eclipse), constructed purely from catalogued positions and radii — nothing invented; annular (antumbral) geometry handled by the cone sign. Bodies on fixed-epoch orbital elements have precession-limited positions, so eclipse timing is approximate far from the element epoch (stated on the toggle). On by default; Visualisation toggle; permalink es=0 hides | derived at render time from the registry’s own catalogued positions + radii (no external source) | — |
| Coronal mass ejections (NASA/CCMC DONKI) | 8,435 analysed coronal mass ejections over the FULL DONKI ARCHIVE — 2010-04 → 2026-07 (the catalog's whole record; DONKI's first analysis is 2010-04-03), tracing both solar cycles (Cycle-24 maximum 2014, minimum 2018, Cycle-25 maximum 2025, including the May-2024 Gannon storm) — refreshed by dated snapshot, not a rolling/live feed: a sim clock after the snapshot's end simply has no CME data yet, and none exists before 2010-04 in this catalog. Shown as its own donki layer — transient events at the Sun (existence-windowed), each carrying its cited directed-cone parameters (apex heliographic latitude/longitude, cone half-angle, bulk speed, time the leading edge reached 21.5 R☉) in its inspector notes. An event missing cone geometry is skipped, never completed with a guess (A5). A Visualisation toggle (“CME cones (DONKI)”, permalink dc=1) renders each event’s measured cone expanding ballistically from the Sun near its epoch — the orientation uses a double-verified Stonyhurst→ecliptic solar frame (Fränz & Harper 2002; IAU pole cross-check), and the extent beyond the 21.5 R☉ fit is a constant-speed extrapolation, labelled MODELLED (A5). Search kind:cme | NASA Community Coordinated Modeling Center — DONKI CMEAnalysis web service (kauai.ccmc.gsfc.nasa.gov/DONKI; the api.nasa.gov/DONKI/CMEAnalysis DEMO_KEY mirror serves identical data) — snapshot 2026-07-21 | US-government work (NASA/CCMC); public domain — cite NASA/CCMC DONKI (no DOI) |
| Textures | 11 planetary maps + the Milky Way structure map | Solar System Scope (planets) · NASA/JPL-Caltech R. Hurt (galaxy concept) | CC BY 4.0 / NASA public domain — see /textures/LICENSE.json |
| Synthetic backdrop | 598 procedural galaxies/stars + 30,000 Milky Way field stars sampled from the NASA structure map — an artist-informed density proxy, NOT a stellar census (real stars are the Gaia layer); all tagged SYNTHETIC, rendered dimmed | Internal factory, seeded & reproducible; map credit NASA/JPL-Caltech R. Hurt | © Adrien Normier · SSR-GPL v2.0 |
Humanity's footprint — every object, signal and scar we have put into space or sent through it.
| Layer | Content | Authority / citation | License / terms |
|---|---|---|---|
| GCAT | 47,650 artificial objects: payloads, stages, components; multisegment trajectories; landings. Includes (2026-07-20 sub-catalog completion) 1,797 failed-to-orbit objects shown at their launch site (existence-windowed to their fall — no fabricated suborbital orbit), 363 uncatalogued analyst objects (csocat, e.g. WT1190F) on their catalogued orbits, auxcat payload detail (pauxcat: category, activity), and hardware identity (alternate names · manufacturer · bus · dry/total mass where differing · operational-orbit class) in the searchable notes. Marked-erroneous (ERR) phantom entries and 0/0 undetermined-orbit rows are excluded rather than fabricated. The worlds.tsv 292-world reference table joins as a CORROBORATION source only (never a node producer): its independent radii/masses reconcile onto 52 matching solar-system bodies — 56 corroborating, 33 kept as alternates (erase none; GCAT quotes equatorial radii where the registry carries mean radii, an honestly-kept difference class). Two sub-catalogs stay deferred with stated reasons: ecat (attached-phase/EVA history parented by OBJECTS, which the body-parented phase model cannot yet render) and tmpcat (provisional scratch rows that graduate into satcat/auxcat at the next GCAT release) | J. McDowell, General Catalog of Artificial Space Objects (planet4589.org) | CC BY 4.0 — snapshot 2026-06-09 (worlds.tsv 2026-07-20) |
| Celestrak GP element sets (orbital-phase join) | 28,390 general-perturbations element sets joined onto GCAT's currently-tracked Earth-orbit objects by SATCAT/NORAD number — the join upgrades every currently-tracked Earth-orbit object the snapshot covers: the orbital-plane orientation (Ω, right ascension of the ascending node), the argument of periapsis (ω) and the orbital-phase angle (M₀, mean anomaly) go from a deterministic placeholder spread to MEASURED values at the element set's own epoch. GCAT's own Perigee/Apogee/Inclination columns (semi-major axis, eccentricity, inclination) are unaffected — this join fills only the three angles GCAT does not carry. ω joined 2026-07-29: it was being parsed and then dropped, so all 19,989 joined orbits were drawn on a MEASURED plane at an UNMEASURED point — displaced along their own track by ω, whose magnitude across the snapshot runs 30° at the 10th percentile and 90° at the median. Carrying it moved those objects a median of 10,146 km (p10 4,807 km, p90 24,489 km), and it is ROTATED, not copied: ω is measured from the ascending node, which moves when the plane is converted from GCAT's body-equatorial frame into the ecliptic. Honest remainder, measured: 110 of the 19,989 (0.55%) still show ω = 0 on their earliest orbital phase, because that phase comes from a row processed before the object's catalogue number was known or from a sub-catalogue the join deliberately does not trust for identity; their current phase carries the measured value. An annotation/upgrade layer: it adds no objects of its own; unmatched objects (deep-space, decayed, surface-landed) keep the honest placeholder-spread note. Search/inspect: the per-object provenance note reads "Ω,ω,M₀ MEASURED (Celestrak GP)" when joined | Celestrak (Dr T.S. Kelso), General Perturbations (GP) element sets — public US Space Surveillance Network data | Public US Government data redistributed by Celestrak; reuse permitted with attribution to Celestrak (Space-Track deliberately not used — its terms forbid automatic redistribution) — snapshot 2026-07-09 |
| CelesTrak SATCAT (independent-catalog reconciliation) | 69,870 satellite-catalog rows (the full US SSN catalog incl. decayed objects) reconciled onto GCAT objects by NORAD number (COSPAR fallback) — an INDEPENDENT catalog of the same population, installed to cross-check GCAT's launch/decay history: 42,253 objects matched; launch dates 41,554 corroborated to the UTC day / 699 kept as disagreeing alternates; end/decay dates 15,998 corroborated / 2,929 kept as alternates (erase none — the canonical is never rewritten, every disagreement stays inspectable); 139 objects GCAT left open-ended gained a labelled Earth-reentry end date from the SATCAT; 38 operational-status annotations where GCAT carries no activity window. An annotation/reconciliation layer: it adds no objects of its own; surface-landed hardware is never given an end date (the footprint persists) | CelesTrak (Dr T.S. Kelso), SATCAT satellite catalog — public US Space Surveillance Network data | Public US Government data redistributed by CelesTrak; reuse permitted with attribution to CelesTrak (Space-Track deliberately not used — its terms forbid automatic redistribution) — snapshot 2026-07-14 |
| GCAT launch log (site / vehicle / outcome join) | The GCAT launch log (launch.tsv) joined onto every catalogued object by Launch_Tag (47,650 objects) → three new search facets: site: (launch site code), lv: (launch vehicle, e.g. lv:soyuz) and outcome: (success / failure / partial, read from the LaunchCode result letter; 'U' unknown is left unset, never guessed — A5). It also upgrades the launch time to minute precision (47,649 objects) where the log carries a time-of-day, replacing the vaguer satcat launch date. An annotation/upgrade join: it adds no objects of its own. Search e.g. outcome:failure, site:CC lv:atlas | J. McDowell, GCAT launch log (planet4589.org/space/gcat) | CC BY 4.0 — snapshot 2026-06-09 |
| GCAT launch sites | 687 launch sites on Earth's surface (their catalogued longitude/latitude) as their own gcat-sites node layer (kind:launchsite), each existence-windowed from its operational span (TStart/TStop). Coordinate-less generic entries (e.g. "Ocean", air-launch) are skipped rather than placed (A5). The site code is the same vocabulary as the object site: facet, so site:<code> returns the site node and every object launched from it. Search kind:launchsite | J. McDowell, GCAT sites catalogue (planet4589.org/space/gcat) | CC BY 4.0 — snapshot 2026-06-09 |
| Upcoming launches (Launch Library 2) | 94 announced upcoming launches as PLANNED markers on their launch pads (the pad's catalogued latitude/longitude), each carrying its agency, rocket, mission, target orbit and announced launch window; the marker EXISTS from the window's start and wears an amber "PLANNED — window" label — an announced launch has no measured trajectory, so NO orbit is drawn (A5). A launch the GCAT catalogue already logs (by launch designator or object name) is NOT re-emitted, so no doubles appear when reality catches up. Recent PAST launches are cross-checked against the GCAT launch log (annotation-only, erase none): 150 of 183 recent launch designators matched GCAT Launch_Tags, 148/150 minute-precise launch times agree to the minute (2 genuine source disagreements kept visible, max ~24 h; 33 launches newer than the GCAT snapshot). Image assets referenced by the API carry per-image licences and are deliberately not used. Search kind:mission | Launch Library 2 API — The Space Devs (ll.thespacedevs.com) — snapshot 2026-07-14 | Free use per The Space Devs terms ("use the data in any way, shape, or form, and share what you create with it"; no raw forwarding without added value — this is a value-added integration); attribution encouraged and given |
| Deep-space trajectories | 24 probes (Voyagers, Pioneers, Cassini, Dawn, DART, Rosetta, Galileo…) — heliocentric cruise arcs refined by piecewise osculating elements from the missions' own navigation solutions; planetary tours and flybys keep their catalog representation | NASA/JPL Horizons API (mission navigation teams' solutions) | Public domain (NASA/JPL); cite JPL Horizons — snapshot 2026-06-10 |
| Predicted trajectories (Horizons) | Published PREDICTED ephemerides for in-flight future missions, rendered on the flown spacecraft's own node — the showcase is Europa Clipper's cruise to Jupiter (monthly osculating arcs through the announced 2030-Apr-11 arrival, bracketing the 2026-12-03 Earth gravity assist). Horizons' own object header states the honesty boundary verbatim ("based on tracking data through 2026-Jun-30. Trajectory thereafter is predicted"): arcs at/before it carry the navigation-solution label, arcs after it are labelled horizons-predicted — a published projection, never presented as flown history (A5). Scrub the clock past today and the craft rides the published prediction. Quarterly manual refresh | NASA/JPL Horizons API — JPL mission-design / navigation trajectory files (the mission team's own published prediction) | Public domain (NASA/JPL); cite JPL Horizons — snapshot 2026-07-21 |
| Interplanetary cruise arcs (Horizons, second batch) | 1,530 heliocentric osculating arcs on 49 more deep-space craft and upper stages — the Mars and Venus orbiters (Mars Express · MRO · MAVEN · Mars Odyssey · Tianwen-1 · ExoMars TGO · Venus Express · Akatsuki), the landers' cruise legs (Perseverance · Curiosity · InSight · Phoenix · Spirit · Opportunity · Mars Pathfinder), the L1/L2 observatories, and the Centaur/S-IVB/Delta stages that carried them. This is a gap in the catalogue, not a want of precision. GCAT publishes a, e, i for its heliocentric rows and NOT Ω, ω, M₀, so the ingest fills those with a documented placeholder spread: the ellipse is roughly right and the position on it is filler. Measured through the engine's own compose on the previous bake, Perseverance stood 466,032,238 km from Mars four days before it landed — on very nearly the opposite side of the Sun — and was already 316,515,757 km from Earth at the epoch of its own cruise element set, four days after launch. The anchor the arcs cannot force: InSight and the two MarCO cubesats flew on one launch and are held here in three SEPARATE JPL kernels, fetched separately and joined through three different nodes; the placeholder spread put them 96 / 323 / 343 million km apart at cruise midpoint, the arcs put them 4,489 / 6,981 / 8,157 km apart. Where the arcs win, they win by RULE: an integrated ephemeris outranks a catalogue mean element (rank 3 vs 1) over the window both cover, and the superseded set is kept on the record with its epoch, its a/e/i and the reason — 66 of them, arbitrated per window, with zero coin tosses. Stated limits: JPL's heliocentric coverage ends at planetary capture, so the residual at the catalogued arrival instant is ~1.2 million km rather than zero (2–3 orders better, and the capture window itself needs body-centred arcs); 15 of 91 windows have no JPL kernel at all (the Apollo S-IVBs past translunar injection, Clementine past its lunar phase, Hayabusa before its return leg), recorded by quoting JPL's own refusal; and two objects are REFUSED because Horizons and GCAT disagree about which piece letter carries which object of a shared launch (2024-179A · 2025-260C) | NASA/JPL Horizons API — EPHEM_TYPE=ELEMENTS, heliocentric, ecliptic, over the windows GCAT itself labels heliocentric | Public domain (NASA/JPL); cite JPL Horizons — snapshot 2026-07-30 |
| Horizons spacecraft roster (coverage measurement — adds no object) | The JPL Horizons major-body index (825 rows, 256 of them flown spacecraft) snapshotted as the AUTHORITY on which artificial objects a trajectory could be sourced for — so a claim about somebody else's archive becomes a dated measurement instead of a one-time assertion. Two numbers come out of it, both re-computed from the committed snapshot. Coverage: of the 247 Horizons spacecraft carrying a COSPAR designation, this registry holds 237 by designation and 5 more by name alone (98.0%); the 5 absent are named. The designation match and the weaker name match are reported as SEPARATE figures and never summed into one. The orphan roll: 29 GCAT deep-space objects that no catalogue places, because GCAT lists them but publishes no geometry for any phase — the Soviet planetary programme (Mars-4/6/7 · Venera-12/13/14 · Vega-1/2 · Fobos-1), Mariner 10, the upper stages that carried them, and three recent objects. Horizons carries exactly ONE of the 29 (New Horizons), and the registry already draws it; the other 28 are simply not in JPL's archive, so they stay unplaced and counted rather than invented (A5). Resolution against the index is by COSPAR designation ONLY: measured live, a NAME query returns MARINER 2 for "Mariner 10" and Tianwen-1 for "Tianwen 2" — confident answers for the wrong spacecraft — and that fact is archived per refused object in the snapshot manifest rather than left as a warning | NASA/JPL Horizons API — the major-body index (COMMAND='MB') | Public domain (NASA/JPL); cite JPL Horizons — snapshot 2026-07-30 |
| Nuclear detonations | 16 curated detonations, Trinity → DPRK 2017, with existence windows | Public historical records, curated | Factual public data; per-record notes |
| Nuclear explosions | ~2,170 detonations 1945–1998 (SIPRI + CMR merged), 19 test sites, EMP emissions modeled per atmospheric/space shot | SIPRI/FOA "Nuclear Explosions 1945–1998" (2000) + OGSO/CMR "Catalog of Nuclear Explosions" (rev. 3, 2006), both from the CMR database (Yang, North & Romney 2000, LDEO) — via data-is-plural/nuclear-explosions | Public domain. Import specification document © Adrien Normier. EMP powers are MODELLED (yield-scaled, Starfish Prime-anchored) — snapshot 2026-06-10 |
| Nuclear weapons tests (OWID aggregate cross-check) | A bake-time CROSS-CHECK only — adds no nodes. Our per-country detonation tally (the SIPRI+CMR layer + curated nukes) is diffed against Our World in Data's annual per-country nuclear-weapons-TEST counts, and the agreement/discrepancy is written onto the nuclear-tests layer card. A5: OWID counts "tests" (a salvo may detonate several devices) and runs the eight declared states to the present, while our count is of individual detonations and its base ends ~1998 — a labelled systematic offset is expected, never reported as silent agreement | Our World in Data, "Nuclear weapons tests" (ourworldindata.org), compiled from the Federation of American Scientists / Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (drawing on SIPRI) — snapshot 2026-07-01 | CC BY (Our World in Data); attribution to OWID + FAS/SIPRI |
| EM signals (METI) | 9 intentional interstellar transmissions, 5 emitter sites incl. Arecibo (with collapse date) | Zaitsev (2006) and public records | Factual public data; per-record notes |
| ASAT tests | The 5 destructive anti-satellite intercepts 1985–2021, as events on the targets' documented orbits (intercept point along the orbit not catalogued — placeholder anomaly, declared per record) | Public intercept records (tracking data, official statements) | Public record |
| Maneuver exhaust (derived) | 118 propellant puffs located at navigation-arc Δv discontinuities, each carrying a Tsiolkovsky propellant mass — upper-bound proxies, declared limits in the method article | Derived from the JPL Horizons layer (factory Footprint) | Dataset © Adrien Normier; underlying arcs public domain (NASA/JPL) |
| Habitability map (habitability facet) | the cited limits of life (replication −15→122 °C, a_w floor 0.585/0.611, Deinococcus radiation, SR-SAG2 255 K/0.60/500 yr) + a per-environment habitability table (habitable / marginal / uninhabitable / control), surfaced in the inspector "habitability" block; "has water ≠ habitable" controls included | Curated data-as-code from the limits-of-life & ocean-worlds literature (Takai 2008; Stevenson 2015/2017; MEPAG SR-SAG2 2014; NRC Ocean Worlds 2012; Waite 2017; Hand 2007; Hallsworth 2021) | Dataset © Adrien Normier; underlying studies public (per-row citation) |
| Solar-system water map (water facet) | per-body inventory of every water phase — ice · subsurface ocean · brine · vapour · hydrated minerals · adsorbed · deep supercritical (Titan's hydrocarbon seas flagged non-water); cited & confidence-tagged, surfaced in the inspector "water & ice" block | Curated data-as-code from the primary mission literature (MESSENGER, LCROSS/LRO, M³, MRO, Mars Express, SWIM, Dawn, OSIRIS-REx, Hayabusa2, Galileo, Cassini, Juno, Voyager 2, New Horizons, Rosetta, Herschel) | Dataset © Adrien Normier; underlying observations public (per-row citation) |
| Biomass map (biomass facet) | the modelled off-Earth biomass ceilings (Enceladus ~10³–10⁴ kg C, Europa ~10⁶ kg C subsurface, Mars density-only — no invented planet total) expressed as % of Earth's measured 5.5×10¹⁷ kg C baseline, in the unified Life & Water panel; MODELLED ceilings, clearly tagged | Curated data-as-code; Earth baseline Bar-On, Phillips & Milo 2018, PNAS (10.1073/pnas.1711842115) | Dataset © Adrien Normier; underlying study public |
| Exobiology-status ladder (exobiology facet) | a curated, cited, per-body ladder of what can honestly and tentatively be said about the possibility of life — ranked by DEFENSIBILITY (life-detected · habitable-measured · habitable-inferred · candidate-biosignature-contested · prebiotic-chemistry · agnostic), surfaced in the unified Life & Water panel. Nowhere off Earth has confirmed life; every rung is a claim about EVIDENCE, and contested signals (Venus phosphine, Mars methane) are shown WITH their published rebuttals. HYPER-HUMBLE / NON-NORMATIVE / A5 | Curated data-as-code from the primary literature (Waite 2017; Postberg 2018/2023; Hand 2007; Tarnas 2018; Webster 2018 & Korablev 2019 & Eigenbrode 2018; Greaves 2021 & Villanueva 2021; Hörst 2017; Iess 2012; Raymond 2020 & De Sanctis 2017; Saur 2015; Glavin 2025; Oba 2023; Colaprete 2010) — per-row DOI in the library | Dataset © Adrien Normier; underlying studies public (per-row DOI) |
| Icy-world interior structure | cited interior layering of 9 candidate ocean worlds (Europa, Ganymede, Callisto, Enceladus, Titan, Mimas, Triton, Pluto, Ceres) — mean radius · ice-I shell · subsurface-ocean thickness · rock-core radius, confidence-tagged; the inspector "interior" line and the data spine for the subsurface cutaway | Curated data-as-code from the primary literature (Čadek 2016; Hemingway & Mittal 2019; Lainey 2024; Steinbrügge 2024; Hemingway 2013; Vance 2018; Park 2016; Ermakov 2017; Nimmo & Pappalardo 2016) — per-row DOI in the library | Dataset © Adrien Normier; underlying studies public (per-row DOI) |
| Surface imagery (sourced terrain) | real body imagery streamed on close approach (kill switch terr=1): a global equirectangular mosaic draped on the body plus a high-resolution local patch ring as you zoom in. Mars wears the Viking MDIM 2.1 colour mosaic (232 m), the Moon the LRO WAC mosaic, Earth the GIBS Blue Marble (+ optional daily true-colour cloud cover). The body stays a smooth sphere (no global DEM); tiles cover the global mosaic, never suppress it. Streamed from the pinned source, never hosted by us | NASA Trek (Mars/Moon WMTS) · NASA EOSDIS GIBS (Earth) — open plate-carrée tile services | Public domain (NASA/JPL/USGS/GSFC); attribution shown in-app with the imagery |
| Moon & small-body surface imagery (sourced terrain) | real global mosaics for 15 more bodies, draped on close approach exactly like Mars/Moon: Titan (Cassini ISS 938 nm albedo mosaic), Enceladus (Cassini ISS 100 m control mosaic), Mimas · Rhea (Cassini ISS, DLR/Roatsch et al.), Tethys (293 m) · Dione (154 m) · Iapetus (783 m) (Cassini/Voyager), Io · Europa · Ganymede (Galileo SSI/Voyager), Phobos (Viking VIS, DLR-controlled), Ceres & Vesta (Dawn Framing Camera), Mercury (MESSENGER MDIS BDR 166 m), Venus (Magellan C3-MDIR SAR). Bodies with no real published mosaic (Deimos, Callisto, Triton, Charon, the Uranian moons…) deliberately keep the labelled generic texture — never a wrong map. Streamed from the pinned source, never hosted by us | NASA Solar System Treks (per-body EQ WMTS) — every layer id + tile + CORS header confirmed live 2026-07-10 | Public domain (NASA/JPL/USGS/JHUAPL; Cassini mosaics credit SSI/DLR, Dawn mosaics credit UCLA/MPS/DLR/IDA); attribution shown in-app with the imagery |
| Apollo landing-site super-detail (LRO NAC) | at close zoom over the six Apollo sites — Apollo 11 (Tranquility Base), 12, 14, 15 (Hadley Rille), 16 (Descartes), 17 (Taurus-Littrow) — the Moon's patch ring switches to the NASA Trek LRO Narrow Angle Camera landing-site mosaic (to z14–16), the lunar analogue of the Mars rover HiRISE orthos: a transparent PNG outside its small box, so the WAC global mosaic shows through at the edges. Coverage boxes taken from the Moon Trek catalog records, never guessed | NASA/GSFC/ASU LRO LROC NAC, via NASA Trek (Moon EQ WMTS) — layer ids + coverage + CORS confirmed live 2026-07-10 | Public domain (U.S. Government work); LROC credit ASU |
| Your own KML (USER overlay) | load any terrestrial .kml (a Google Earth export…) from the Visualisation stage — its points, paths and polygon outlines drape on Earth's rotating ground as a USER-provenance overlay. Strictly local (§ zero-server): the file is read in your browser and never transmitted anywhere; altitudes are draped at ground level (never invented); capped counts are reported honestly. Display-only — never enters the registry | the user's own file (USER provenance) | the user's own data — no licence claimed by us |
| Compare your database (local comparison tool) | from the Search & AI palette ("Compare your database (local)" — no AI key needed): load your own CSV or JSON (an array of objects) and compare it against the loaded registry. Matching runs a four-rung LADDER, matches counted per rung: rung 0 EXACT catalog identifiers (COSPAR with its piece letter · NORAD/SATCAT number · HIP number); rung 1 DESIGNATIONS (a launch-level COSPAR without the piece letter — expected AMBIGUOUS on any multi-object launch, stated · minor-planet catalogue number / IAU provisional designation · Gaia DR3 source_id); rung 2 POSITION for star-like rows (RA/Dec — decimal degrees or sexagesimal, RA hours convention — within 6′ plus |Δmag| ≤ 1.5 magnitude arbitration, the registry's own star-identity gate; SYNTHETIC backdrop stars are never matchable); rung 3 CORROBORATED NAME — a bare name alone NEVER matches: a same-named registry object is admitted only when a second mapped field corroborates it (launch/decay on the same UTC day · |Δmag| ≤ 0.5 · radius/mass within the census near band); same-named rows nothing corroborates are counted NAME-ONLY, never common, and the rung honestly DECLINES (stated) when the mapping carries no corroborable field. Reports common / theirs-only / ours-only / ambiguous / name-only counts, plus a per-field census on launch & decay dates (same-UTC-calendar-day tolerance, stated on the row), magnitude (|Δmag| bands, stated), and the measured radius (m/km, user-confirmed unit) and mass (kg) — σ-AWARE where both sides carry a 1σ (the 2σ criterion, verdicts counted per regime; else the flagged σ-blind relative spread), with named worst-disagreement examples. The row classification runs in a background Web Worker where the browser provides one (the page stays fluid on a 250,000-row file), with an equivalent chunked main-thread fallback — which engine ran is stated. After a run the results are live as SESSION facets — cmp:matched · cmp:disagree · cmp:ours-only · cmp:compared — drivable as badges or by the AI through the ordinary query grammar; session-only (replaced by the next run, never in a permalink — a shared cmp: badge resolves to zero elsewhere). Three-valued honesty: a field absent on either side is UNASSESSED, never a disagreement; a key matching several of our objects is counted AMBIGUOUS, never guessed. Strictly local (§ zero-server): the file is read in your browser and never transmitted; there is no URL import by design; caps 50 MB / 250,000 rows with truncation stated; the result has no share or permalink path (honestly non-portable) and is for your own use. Display-only — never enters the registry. The compare panel also carries the PAIRWISE SOURCE-OVERLAP TABLE: for every cross-source identity join the bake itself performs (Celestrak SATCAT ↔ GCAT · Launch Library ↔ the GCAT launch log · Gaia ↔ exoplanet hosts · NEOWISE ↔ SBDB · JPL satellites ↔ the curated moons · Gaia ↔ curated stars · GCAT worlds ↔ bodies · the Exoplanet Archive ↔ curated stars), how many objects are doubly-sourced and how many values were kept as corroborations vs disagreeing alternates (erase none) — persisted at bake time in the small atlantis-joins.json sidecar (censuses only, never row dumps) and never recomputed in the browser | the user's own file (USER provenance) compared against the loaded bake; the overlap table: the bake's own join reports over the committed snapshots | the user's own data — no licence claimed by us; catalogs disagree legitimately, nothing here is a verdict |
| Scale-model builder — outer worlds & basemaps (OpenStreetMap · NASA GIBS) | the scale-model builder mode (🗺, experimental) overlays the selected stellar system on an OUTER WORLD — the place where the physical model is built, chosen from a selector: map world (default) — raster tiles render UNDER the transparent sim canvas to plan a to-scale model on real ground (schoolyard → city), with a basemap select: street (OpenStreetMap, default — parcel/building detail to zoom 19) or satellite (NASA GIBS Blue Marble shaded relief + bathymetry, EPSG:3857, keyless, public domain — a static cloud-free composite; its tile pyramid ends at native zoom 8, ≈600 m/px at the equator, so closer zooms show upscaled, honestly blurry ground and the UI states it: for building-scale precision use the street map or your own scan; the date-parameterized daily true-colour layers were deliberately not used — they wear that day's real cloud cover), plus place search (on explicit submit only — never per keystroke) and a click-to-draw area auto-fit; crystal box / sphere — a stated-size volume (box presets: 50/60/80/100 mm cubes, 15×15×15 cm and 15×15×30 cm SSLE stock, plus free W×D×H mm entry; sphere presets 60/80 mm Ø) drawn as a wireframe around the framed system — the box fit uses the SHORTEST dimension (stated: the model fits whichever way the crystal is turned) — with the honest fit readout (scale ratio, 1 AU and the host star's own size in the crystal — from the selected system's real registry radius, never assumed), a user-settable point budget (≤200,000 hard cap) with a live "points at current settings" count, and a rendu crystal preview checkbox that renders the engraved cloud exactly as sampled — the SAME sampler and budget the export uses, a snapshot at the sim clock, white monochrome points inside the volume with the periphery dimmed, each point drawn at a stated physical bubble size — the engraving-void diameter (default 0.10 mm, the subsurface-laser-engraving literature’s typical void size; settable 0.02–0.3 mm; the preview point size derives from it at the crystal’s physical scale, and the export manifest states the chosen bubble with the honest note that the bureau’s machine settings govern the real void — geometry is exported, never laser parameters) — plus the crystal point-cloud export: one point per registry object at the sim clock (optionally with MODELLED Kepler orbit-path samples; truncation always stated), expressed in the crystal's own frame (the on-screen pose you arranged), downloaded client-side as PLY + XYZ + a manifest naming scale, dims, pose, date, counts and the honest note — a subsurface-laser-engraving (SSLE) bureau consumes the point cloud; no machine driver is shipped, no vendor endorsed; the file export itself is gated behind an access code (a semi-private production path for now — the on-screen preview stays open to all); OBJ/STL of a place — load your own 3-D model/scan of the build site (.obj, or .stl in either the ASCII or the binary fixed layout; capped at 200,000 triangles, truncation stated) as the outer-world surface drawn around the framed system: you state the place's real size (longest side) and the readout gives the same honest fit (scale ratio, 1 AU and the host star's own size on the place); precise DEM of a place — your own greyscale heightmap image (PNG/JPEG, decoded in the browser, sampled to ≤256 per side) with stated real bounds (width/depth) and height range, displaced as a relief surface (GeoTIFF deliberately unsupported — no licence-clean pure decoder exists without vendoring one). Both place worlds are strictly local (§ zero-server): the file is read in your browser and never transmitted; display-only USER provenance, never enters the registry. The Earth-view/satellite map class is RESOLVED (2026-07-21): the keyless licence-clean door is NASA GIBS — the same origin the terrain system already streams — so satellite imagery lives inside the map world as its second basemap rather than a separate outer world; no Google/keyed path was built. MANIPULATION is TWO-BODY: one segmented control — move: cosmos | support | 🔒 locked — routes gestures to either the framed system (cosmos) or the outer world (support: the map takes gestures directly; a crystal/place turns with the pad), while 🔒 locked freezes the scale/pose relationship and moves both as one (on the map the locked fit ratio re-applies on every map zoom; in a crystal world the cosmos mode makes the support follow your view so you turn the cosmos inside the crystal, then lock). A ⟳ align control cycles the automatic alignments — plan view · orbit-pole (down the measured system angular-momentum axis, unit-mass Σ r×v, masses not assumed) · edge-on/transit · pole-up · the target's velocity vector at the sim clock · the host-star→target axis · the drawn area's longest chord (map) · the box's shortest axis onto the system pole · square-to-view — each named on screen, unavailable ones skipped honestly. The map world is entirely KEYLESS — no API key, nothing to configure. Tiles and geocoding stream straight from the OpenStreetMap or NASA GIBS servers only while the mode is open (light, user-initiated use per the OSMF tile usage policy and the Nominatim usage policy, ≤1 request/s; GIBS per the NASA data-use guidance); nothing is proxied or hosted by us. Display-only — never enters the registry | © OpenStreetMap contributors (street map data + Nominatim geocoding); satellite imagery courtesy of NASA's Global Imagery Browse Services (GIBS), part of NASA's Earth Science Data and Information System (ESDIS) — Blue Marble shaded relief + bathymetry; rendered with Leaflet 1.9.4, lazy-loaded from a pinned CDN only when the mode opens; crystal exports are computed from the loaded registry in your browser | Street map data ODbL 1.0; GIBS imagery public domain (U.S. Government work, acknowledgment requested) — attribution always shown on the map; Leaflet BSD-2-Clause; exported point clouds carry the registry's own licence terms |
| Sun imagery by date (GOES-SUVI) | with the toggle on (kill switch si=1, off by default) the Sun's procedural surface is replaced by a REAL full-disc solar image nearest the sim clock, projected onto the sphere. The earth-facing hemisphere shows the observed disc; the rest is the SAME disc replicated at 90/180/270° about the polar axis — a disclosed hypothesis, never claimed as observed on the far side. Honest scope: SUVI is a rolling recent buffer (~2017-present, GOES only), so a sim clock outside the window degrades to the generic Sun texture. Streamed from the pinned source, never hosted by us | NOAA SWPC (Space Weather Prediction Center) GOES-SUVI 195 Å full-disc PNGs — services.swpc.noaa.gov (CORS-open animation index, timestamped frames) | Public domain (US Government — NOAA / GOES-R); credit shown in-app |
| Rover/lander super-detail (HiRISE) | at rover/helicopter/lander zoom — where the 232 m global mosaic shows a single texel — the patch ring switches to the NASA Trek HiRISE site ortho covering that landing site, the sanctioned exception to the smooth-sphere "no-DEM" doctrine (which still stands for the generic body). Installed sites: Perseverance + Ingenuity (Jezero, 25 cm controlled ortho), Curiosity (Gale), Opportunity (Meridiani), Spirit (Columbia Hills), InSight (Elysium). The ortho is a transparent PNG outside its small box, so the global mosaic shows through at the edges; the HiRISE credit replaces the base credit while it is on screen | NASA/JPL · University of Arizona HiRISE (MRO), via NASA Trek (Mars EQ WMTS) — layer ids + coverage confirmed live 2026-06-17 | Public domain (NASA/JPL); HiRISE credit University of Arizona |
| Rover tracks from orbit (HiRISE) | the published orbital observations of the Curiosity (Gale), Perseverance (Jezero) and Opportunity (Meridiani) wheel tracks, as surface-fixed marks linked to MARS (kind:site) at each worksite — "traces are objects linked to the planet, not the rover" | NASA/JPL · University of Arizona HiRISE (MRO) — uahirise.org/releases/msl-tracks | Public domain (NASA/JPL); HiRISE credit University of Arizona |
| Planetary protection (pp facet, derived) | per-object COSPAR classification (mission class · physical contact · contemporary & present-day category) and a modelled upper-bound bioburden under era-compliance, with the per-body "maximal compliant burden" metric — method & declared limits in the method article; never a compliance verdict.
COVERAGE — 100% of the launched population. COSPAR's obligation attaches to a MISSION and its DESTINATION, not only to the objects that touched the ground, so the classification is derived for every one of the 51,772 artificial objects from the catalogued TRAJECTORY: the destination is not a column (GCAT's Dest holds dispositions — LEO, GEO, landing strips; Primary reads "Earth" on 69,360 of satcat's 69,420 rows) but the STRUCTURE, since GCAT carries it through its sub-catalogues and the bake materialises those as phases under their own parent body. Measured on the shipped bake: 1,220 objects reached a body beyond Earth — Moon 1,017 · Mars 94 · Venus 90 · Jupiter 21 · Saturn 8 · Mercury 6 · Europa, Ganymede, Titan, Uranus, Neptune, Vesta, Ceres and 2 asteroids one each — and 50,552 reached none (50,277 never left the Earth system, 275 heliocentric with no catalogued arrival), which is itself a classification: no target body means no forward-contamination category. Jettisoned hardware is in on its own merits — 88 rocket stages and 55 components carry a category of their own.
THE PHASE SHAPE IS THE EVIDENCE, at the resolution the category needs and no finer: a fixed offset in the body's frame is surface contact, orbital elements are an orbiter, a frame the object leaves again is a passage — a flyby, which COSPAR states in the SAME clause as an orbiter ("Category III … mostly flyby and orbiter") — and a terminal frame assignment with neither is an arrival the catalogue does not resolve. Where that leaves orbiter and lander both open AND their categories differ at that body, no category is claimed (2 objects); a body COSPAR's tables do not classify gets none either (2). Two refusals more: the atmos refinement (destroyed in descent vs reached the surface) is invisible to geometry and stays curated, and a flyby the catalogue kept in heliocentric elements is not seen at all — so the flyby population is undercounted, never overcounted.
THE RESULT, AND THE ONLY SHAPE IT MAY BE PUBLISHED IN: 96 objects carried a decontamination obligation under the policy in force at their launch (Mars 92 · Europa, Ganymede, Titan, Ceres one each) — an obligation being a category that CAPS the delivered bioburden, which Categories I and II never do; the documentation is publicly traceable for 0 of them. The two counts are asymmetric by nature: the obligation is exhaustively computable (body × mission class × epoch, all three in the bake), the conformity is not (it depends on public documentation, the 17-row curated column — whose objects are all Moon and Venus, i.e. category II, which is why not one of them is among the 96). The difference is NEVER a non-compliance count: undocumented is not non-compliant. A pre-1964 launch carries no obligation at all, because no policy existed to carry — the regime table dates it. | Derived from the bake's own phase structure (registry/ppframes.ts) + the published COSPAR policy tables (registry/pp.ts); the documentation column curated per object. Category-specific body listing and the Mars numbers read from the COSPAR Policy on Planetary Protection, with the 2024 Icy-Worlds restructure (Space Research Today n°224) | Dataset © Adrien Normier; GCAT public (CC BY); COSPAR policy public |
Footprint classification (containment & vector facets) | a tentative, provisional sorting of human-made objects along two axes: a containment class (mission — reach bounded to an object/body · biotope — reach into one planetary environment · uncontained — reach outward as light/radio) and a vector (engineered-object · fragment · effluent · biological · electromagnetic · energetic · kinetic). A derived heuristic (from kind/origin/host/emission), offered for filtering only — non-normative, never a value judgement, open to revision; shown in the record's "footprint" row. Search with containment:biotope, vector:fragment | Our own tentative interpretation, borrowing the standard environmental-assessment chain (Source–Pathway–Receptor, Holdgate 1979; DPSIR, OECD/EEA). No external endorsement is claimed | Derived classification © Adrien Normier |
| 3D models (index) | 185 spacecraft/instrument GLB models indexed by URL (binaries stream from the pinned source commit, never stored here); 256 reconciled onto registry objects by conservative name match + curated aliases — including the ISS, Skylab Orbital Workshop, the Space Shuttle orbiter fleet (STS-qualified, so the SpaceX "Dragon Endeavour" Crew flights are not dressed as shuttles) and the Apollo Lunar Module at the Apollo landing sites | NASA 3D Resources (github.com/nasa/NASA-3D-Resources) | NASA media guidelines; per-model credits in the repo |
| DSN Now | Measured deep-space network fixes (validation layer) | NASA/JPL Deep Space Network public feed | Public — snapshot 2026-06-10 |
| Live pipes (watch-live) | For a handful of still-streaming objects, a prominent "▶ watch live" that fetches the object's OWN current published output on demand — the Sun now (SDO AIA 193 Å, SOHO LASCO C3), Earth now (GOES-19 ABI GeoColor), the latest Mars raw camera image (Perseverance, Curiosity) and the Deep Space Network antennas talking right now. Endpoint facts only are baked; NOTHING is stored or proxied — your browser fetches the provider directly when you click (§3.1) | NASA/SDO · SOHO (ESA & NASA) · NOAA STAR/GOES · NASA/JPL Mars raw images · NASA/JPL DSN Now | US-gov public domain (SOHO joint ESA/NASA, attribution shown); fetched live, per provider terms |
| In the news (live rail) | from the Search & AI palette ("🗞 in the news"): a compact rail of current spaceflight headlines — METADATA ONLY (title · news site · date · summary snippet); article images are deliberately not shown and full text stays at the source (every item is an external link to its original site). Where an article names a Launch Library 2 launch the registry’s own upcoming-launch marker carries (an EXACT shared LL2 id — no guessing, no language processing), the row gains a "voir dans le registre" teleport chip: the sim clock jumps into the announced launch window and the camera flies to the pad marker. Articles matching nothing stay honest link-outs, never force-joined; the joined census is stated (N articles · M joined). Fetched by YOUR browser on the explicit open gesture only — one modest page per session, never at boot, never polled; ⟳ is the only re-fetch; offline or unreachable degrades to an honest note (nothing is cached or proxied, § zero-server). Live content — no permalink key by design | Spaceflight News API v4 — The Space Devs (spaceflightnewsapi.net; article metadata + Launch Library 2 launch cross-references; each story credited and linked to its original news site) | The Space Devs free-use terms (the same footing as the Launch Library 2 ingest: "use the data in any way, shape, or form"; no raw forwarding without added value — the registry join is the added value; attribution encouraged and given); per-article text/images remain the original site’s — linked out, not reproduced |
| UN Register (UNOOSA) | 24,866 index entries of the Online Index of Objects Launched into Outer Space — joined by COSPAR designator onto the objects above, yielding the three-way registration facet: declared (registered with the UN, document symbol kept per object) · undeclared (in the index, no registration submitted) · unknown (payloads the index does not list). An annotation layer: it adds no objects of its own. Search/filter with un:declared, un:undeclared, un:unknown | United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs, Online Index of Objects Launched into Outer Space (Registration Convention / GA res. 1721B) — snapshot 2026-06-11 via the index's own search service | © United Nations — UN terms of use |
| Manmade Material on the Moon (NASA) | 694 catalogued line items left at the six Apollo landing sites (tools, experiment hardware, flags, symbolic objects), each a child of its lunar module — deployed at the landing instant, positioned at the site, co-rotating with the Moon. GCAT-tracked hardware (descent/ascent stages, S-IVB, subsatellites) is never duplicated; the catalogue’s Soviet/robotic pages list whole spacecraft GCAT already tracks. Search db:nasa-mmm | NASA History Program Office, "Catalogue of Manmade Material on the Moon" (2012-07-05) — snapshot 2026-06-11 | US government work (public domain) |
| A Profile of Humanity | ~90 interstellar radio messages + moonbounce transmissions, 110 cultural artifacts & intended messages (83 matched onto their carrier spacecraft), bio-footprints on Moon/Mars | Paul E. Quast — "A Profile of Humanity: the cultural signature of Earth's inhabitants beyond the atmosphere" (Int. J. Astrobiology, 10.1017/S1473550418000290) and the author's living workbook (ed. 2024-01-16) | Courtesy of the author — prototype import from the provided workbook; final license terms at publication. Cite the article. |
| UCS Satellite Database | ~7,560 operational satellites — joined by COSPAR designator onto the catalogue objects above, annotating each with its operational purpose (Communications · Earth Observation · Navigation · Space Science · Technology Development…) and user class (Commercial · Government · Military · Civil). An annotation layer: it adds no objects. Search/filter with purpose:observation, users:commercial, etc. 7,506 of the catalogue's objects matched. A second, independent view of the operator (cf. the GCAT-derived originator facet — where the two sources differ, both are kept). Data paused at version 5-1-2023 (current to 2023-05-01) | Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) Satellite Database, version 5-1-2023 — snapshot of the published tab-delimited file | Free, use unrestricted; UCS requests acknowledgement |
| International Space Station (curated) | One persistent navigable ISS on its operational orbit (~420 km, 51.64°, 1998→present) + a timeline of 33 events (16 assembly milestones, 11 dockings/undockings, 6 EVA milestones) as time-located kind:iss-event pulses parented to the complex. The modules are individually in GCAT; this adds the assembled, time-progressive complex. Search "ISS" | NASA ISS assembly elements · NASA spacewalking history · NASA EVA chronology · GCAT | Public record (US government work) · GCAT CC BY 4.0 |
| Artificial impact sites (curated) | 26 marks: 25 located human-made impact craters/scars, each a surface-fixed mark at its measured lat/lon, appearing at the impact instant: 19 on the Moon (Rangers, the Apollo S-IVB seismic impacts, SMART-1, LCROSS, GRAIL, LADEE, Beresheet, Vikram, Luna 25…), 3 on Mars (Curiosity/Perseverance descent stages, Schiaparelli), 1 on Mercury (MESSENGER), DART→Dimorphos, Hayabusa2 SCI→Ryugu. Plus one FORECAST, flagged as such and drawn in a different colour: the Falcon 9 upper stage 2025-010D, due to strike the Moon near crater Einstein on 2026 August 5 at 06:34:32.9 UTC — nothing there has been seen yet, and when it has, the predicted coordinates are replaced by measured ones. The flown object itself (GCAT_S62719) carries the same solution as its terminal fix — at the predicted point at the predicted instant, its end-of-existence corrected to 06:34:32.9 UTC with GCAT's own 06:44 decay epoch kept as an alternate (erase none). The DESCENT is now drawn, and from a different source: Project Pluto publishes no arrival azimuth, so its approach curve would have been invented and was refused — JPL Horizons carries the object (spkid -162719, trajectory solution 2025-010D_GA1A2_15) and serves the selenocentric ephemeris, so the stage rides 184 sourced osculating arcs in the Moon's frame from 2026-08-04 00:00 UTC (80,005 km out) to impact instead of vanishing a quarter of a million km short. The two determinations DISAGREE and both are kept: at the Project Pluto instant the Horizons solution still has the stage 28.5 km up, reaching the ground 23.3 s later and 14.8 km away — the impact point shown is the chosen one, the Horizons instant is an existsUntil alternate. One limit stays on the record: the whole arc is a PREDICTION (that solution is fit to data through 2026-Jul-07). The other has been CLOSED and measured — the arc is inertial while the impact point is surface-fixed, and until the Moon was given its real synchronous rotation the two could not meet: the descent missed its own crater by 1,108 km. With the IAU/NAIF lunar rotation in place the miss is 40.4 km: 32.1 km of it is simply the altitude the Horizons solution still carries at the Project Pluto instant (the two determinations' own 28.5 km disagreement, not a model error) and 24.3 km is sideways, essentially all of it the deliberately unmodelled 0.76° Cassini precession of the lunar pole at that date. kind:impact-site; each note links the high-res LROC/HiRISE image | NASA NSSDCA · LROC (Wagner et al. 2017, Icarus 283) · HiRISE · DART (Nature 2023) · Hayabusa2 (Science 2020) · Bill Gray / Project Pluto (2025-010D impact solution) · JPL Horizons (2025-010D terminal approach) | Public record (NASA/LROC/HiRISE/JPL public domain) |
| Rover tracks from orbit (curated) | Orbital HiRISE (MRO) observations of the Curiosity (Gale), Perseverance (Jezero) and Opportunity (Meridiani) wheel tracks — surface-fixed marks on Mars linking the published image; the trace as a feature of the planet, not a property of the rover (per the owner). kind:site | NASA/JPL · University of Arizona HiRISE | Public domain (NASA/UA imagery) |
| Mars surface traverses & Ingenuity flights (MMGIS) | The published waypoint logs of the Perseverance and Curiosity traverses, joined onto the rover objects as dated surface positions (each kept waypoint places the vehicle on the rotating Martian ground at the sol it was there, so playing time drives it along its real path; the logs are distance-decimated to a declared cap, shape-preserving). The Ingenuity helicopter is its own roverpaths node: each of its flights is expanded from the log's start time, duration and maximum altitude into a simple MODELLED climb–cruise–descent profile so the hops read as flight — the profile is declared modelled, and a log row whose own timing fields contradict each other is kept as a single ground-to-ground move rather than trusted (A5). One thing a traverse carries that the launch catalogue's landing record does not is an elevation: a catalogued landing is placed at the body's mean radius, because that is all its source gives. Where the object's own traverse then measures the same place with a real elevation, the datum placement is superseded — dropped, with the traverse's first waypoint re-anchored to the catalogued landing instant, so the rover stands on the ground from the moment it lands. Until 2026-07-29 the two sat side by side and were interpolated between: Perseverance descended 2,570 m over 13.4 days and Curiosity 4,501 m over 3.1 days, through altitudes nobody measured. A placement carrying a real elevation is a measurement and is never dropped | NASA/JPL-Caltech — Mars MMGIS waypoint feeds (mars.nasa.gov/mmgis-maps, M20 + MSL) — snapshot 2026-06-12 | Public domain (NASA/JPL-Caltech) |
| Object class & nationality | The generic GCAT 'payload' kind is split by psatcat Category into kind:spacestation (760, Mir/Salyut/Tiangong/ISS…), kind:probe (planetary/deep-space, Category PLAN) and kind:telescope (Category AST). Each object's GCAT State code is mapped to a human nation name on a nation field — the nation:france / nation:usa search facet | GCAT psatcat Category / State codes (J. McDowell) | CC BY 4.0 — snapshot 2026-06-09 |
| Concept missions (projected) | A gated, PROJECTED scenario overlay (never baked into truth) drawing a dashed leg-chain through real catalogue stars. First instance: the owner's photogravitational-lightsail concept (Sol → Sirius A → Procyon A; laserless launch 4.6%c · Sirius-A hub ≤12%c · afterburner ≤9%c · chained to 17%c), shown humbly as "a concept" | A. Normier (Paris-Sorbonne MII, 2020), after Heller et al. 2017 (10.3847/1538-4357/834/1/22) & Heller & Hippke 2017 (10.3847/2041-8213/aa813f) | Author's concept; underlying papers public (DOI). Modelled/projected, origin ARTIFICIAL |
| Future missions (curated) | A small set of announced / en-route deep-space & crewed missions — Europa Clipper, JUICE, Dragonfly, the Artemis crewed lunar landing, the Mars Sample Return concept — shown as PLANNED-MARKER annotations placed at the centre of their target body (Moon · Mars · Europa · Ganymede · Titan). No trajectory is invented: an unflown mission has no real position, so it is a labelled marker on its destination, not a faked path. existsFrom starts at the announced launch window (or year) only where one is publicly stated; an unfixed date is omitted, never guessed (A5). Each record carries its cited status/window, the Launch Library 2 launch UUID where one exists (the dedup key: a curated mission the LL2 upcoming manifest also lists renders ONCE — the curated marker wins, the LL2 pad marker is suppressed at bake, census on the layer card), and — for launched missions — the flown spacecraft's COSPAR cross-reference. Published predicted trajectories ride the flown object (see "Predicted trajectories (Horizons)" above), never this marker. Quarterly manual curation. Search kind:mission | Public NASA / ESA mission-announcement pages — Europa Clipper (science.nasa.gov/mission/europa-clipper) · JUICE (esa.int/juice) · Dragonfly (science.nasa.gov/mission/dragonfly) · Artemis (nasa.gov/artemis) · Mars Sample Return (nasa.gov/mars-sample-return) · launch cross-refs: Launch Library 2 (The Space Devs, checked 2026-07-21) | Public record (mission announcements — no DOI; the stable mission page is the citation); LL2 ids under The Space Devs free-use terms |
Refresh discipline: sources are re-fetched into new dated snapshots, reviewed, and re-baked offline — the application itself never calls external services. Snapshots are never deleted or overwritten.
Default style by tags: NATURAL bodies in white/grey · ARTIFICIAL
objects in magenta · SYNTHETIC content dim and translucent. Trails are
analytical orbit evaluations (not recorded histories), cast in a frame
you can elect: a multiphase spacecraft can draw its full history since
launch, data seams between navigation arcs are reconnected where the
arcs genuinely converge (a seam that never converges stays an honest
break), and an object resting on a surface draws no orbit-frame trail —
its honest trace is the co-rotating ground track (toggleable; permalink
tss=0 restores the legacy behaviour). Trails can be graduated
like school TIME rulers — major tick strokes at round calendar steps (a
day, a month, a year, a century…) plus one finer minor subdivision (a
year with quarters, a month with 5-day blocks), both picked from the
visible span; an optional date legend labels the selected trail's major
ticks ("1981 · Jan · Feb … 1982" — a year tick prints its year, sub-day
ticks the time, deep-time ticks a ±ky/My/Gy offset from J2000) — and a
trail-length slider can impose how much time every trail draws (1 hour →
5 Gy — deep enough to watch Andromeda's approach; automatic by default).
The selected object's trail can also be
composed in MORE THAN ONE frame at once — the "trail frames" row
(Visualisation) names the elected composing frame and a (+) adds up to 3
of the object's own ancestor frames (its real gravitational chain, never
an arbitrary frame): each added frame draws one more, dimmer trail of the
same object re-expressed in that frame (e.g. Earth's heliocentric orbit
ring alongside the same year of motion dragged along the Sun's galactic
drift in the Milky Way frame); every honesty guard applies per frame, and
the set is session-only, clearing when the selection changes.
Once a length is imposed, a slim slider
band also surfaces on the LEFT edge of the main screen (mirroring the
right-hand zoom band, and reaching all the way to ~5 Gy — long enough
to watch Andromeda drift in) so the span can be adjusted without opening a
panel; its "auto" control releases the band and restores the automatic
election. At a scene anchored on
a periodless node (a star system view, a galaxy view) each closed orbit
draws its one nearly-closed loop — a full clean ring — rather than an
arbitrary one-year stub; at a planet-anchored scene the planet's own
period stays the shared time window. The trail budget (an FPS-governed
cap, as are the ≤128-per-badge trail flags) is spent only on objects
that actually draw — surface-resting items never consume a slot. When the
selected object draws no trail, the trail settings (Visualisation) state
the honest reason — resting on a surface, no measured velocity in the
registry (no trail is invented), outside its existence window, or hidden
by a filter badge. The dynamic legend
picks the key objects at your current
scale agnostically — no hardcoded favorites; landing on a planetary
system labels its star and planets. The 🔗 button saves the entire view
state into a URL you can share.
Provenance is visible in the scene itself. Every scene label of
a non-observed element carries an amber sub-line naming WHY it is not an
observation (GENERIC FIT · SYNTHETIC · MODELLED · PROCEDURAL SHAPE ·
MODELLED ORBIT · ± ALT SOURCES · GENERIC TEXTURE · MANUAL FIT), on by
default (vp=0 hides it). A 3D model on stage carries its own
provenance card — the model's source, plus a caution where its attitude
or texture is procedural or hand-fitted (mil=0 hides it).
Where a mission's model is known to change over time, the model follows
curated time windows (the launch stack at launch, the rover only after
touchdown); a window for which no honest mesh exists shows nothing rather
than a wrong mesh (mp=0 disables the swap). Solar panels on
a small set of reconciled models track the Sun and dish antennas aim at
Earth — a geometric articulation, declared on the model card, not
telemetry.
Search grammar. Search accepts free text plus facet filters —
kind: · origin: · prov: ·
db: · has: (incl. has:landed /
has:orbiting resting-state tags, has:nakedeye —
visible to the naked eye in Earth's sky: stars by measured magnitude ≤ 6.5
plus curated facts such as the planets to Uranus, M31/LMC/SMC, witnessed
supernovae at peak and the ISS; absence = unassessed, not invisible — and
has:name — carries a deliberate human-given name rather than
only an automatic catalogue designation (HIP 12345, Gaia DR3 …,
PSZ2 G…, a 1996 JG provisional, hardware serials); a
serialized program name such as Starlink 2113 counts as named, a
Bayer/Flamsteed form such as alf Ari does not, and factory-generated
labels never qualify) · un: ·
nation: · originator: · purpose: ·
users: · site: · lv: ·
outcome: · band: and profile:
(the EM band(s) and emission profile of a human transmission) ·
containment: · vector: · under:
(everything inside a named gravity well). Facet keys are
case-insensitive; filters AND-compose with each other and with the free
text. Numeric RANGE/COMPARATOR facets over a declared whitelist of
measured fields — radius: · mass: ·
temperature: · distance: ·
launched: · mag: — accept >
< >= <= and the inclusive
a..b range, with unit suffixes (km/m · kg · K · pc/ly/au;
no suffix = the SI base unit). Examples:
kind:star mag:<=6.5 distance:>100pc — naked-eye-bright
stars catalogued beyond 100 parsecs; launched:<1970 —
hardware with a catalogued launch epoch before 1970. A record that never
measured the field matches no comparator (unassessed — absence is not a
value); an unlisted numeric facet is not grammar and degrades to free
text.
The scene shows every object where it is at the simulated instant, in one shared slice of time. It is not a picture of the sky as seen from Earth: nothing here is delayed by the travel time of its light. Look at a star 300 light-years away and you are looking at a modelled present position, while the light actually reaching a telescope tonight left it three centuries ago.
That choice has a consequence at ingest, and the registry acts on it. An astrometric catalogue records where a star appeared — its position is already old by the light-travel time when it is measured. So a star's placement is displaced along its own measured velocity by two terms: the offset between the catalogue's reference epoch and J2000, and the light-travel time d/c. On the shipped data the second term is the larger of the two — a median of about 20 arc-seconds against about 3. A star with no measured velocity is not displaced at all; nothing is invented to make the arithmetic work.
Because different catalogues answer the question differently, every object's record carries a line saying which regime it is in — computed from a dynamical model at that instant · measured then propagated · measured and held because no motion was ever measured (which is an absence of data, not a claim that it is at rest) · placed at a modelled comoving distance from redshift (a present-day distance in a cosmological model, not a light-travel distance) · or an arrival epoch, where the date on the record is when the light or signal reached Earth rather than when the event happened.
Transients used to be in that last class and no longer are. A supernova or a gravitational-wave merger is now placed when it happened: the travel time is removed so the event sits in the same absolute slice as everything else. SN 1054 explodes around 5470 BCE, and 1054 is when its light reached Earth — a measurement that is preserved, not discarded. For a supernova the removed span is simply distance/c. For a merger billions of light-years away it is the modelled lookback time, which is not the luminosity distance over c: for GW190521 that naive figure gives 17.3 billion years, older than the universe itself, against a real 7.1. An event with no published distance is not re-dated at all, and says so.
One consequence is worth stating plainly: a gravitational-wave marker used to appear only from the date it was detected, and now exists throughout human history — because the merger does.
An optional observer view — showing the scene as one chosen observer sees it at a chosen moment, every object pushed back to where it was when the light now arriving left it — is designed and not yet built. One thing it will make checkable: seen from Earth, the corrected star positions must reproduce the raw catalogue sky exactly.
The plain-language paragraphs above describe a choice that has a precise technical statement, and the registry's data rests on it, so it is set out here in full with its sources.
Two time arguments. Let tc be coordinate time in the BCRS (Barycentric Celestial Reference System, IAU 2000 Resolution B1.3), realised with TCB, and let ta be the time of light arrival at the solar-system barycentre. A statement "the source is at b at tc" picks a point on a simultaneity hypersurface of the BCRS and is not directly observable. A statement "the source is seen in direction u at ta" is an observable, and it refers to the source's coordinate position at the retarded instant tc = ta − |b|/c.
Which one the catalogues use. Gaia adopts the standard model of stellar motion — uniform rectilinear barycentric motion, b(t) = bep + (t − tep)v — after Lindegren et al. (2012), on the relativistic observation model of Klioner (2003). The Gaia Data Release documentation, Chapter 4 Astrometry, §4.1.4 Standard model of stellar motion, states its time argument explicitly:
"Equation [4.2] ignores the finite speed of light. In principle, the barycentric coordinate direction measured at time t corresponds to the barycentric position of the source at the time t − |b|c−1, several (or many) years earlier."
"the standard model is therefore parametrised by quantities representing the position and motion of the source as they appear from the SSB at a given time. Thus, the time argument in ūB(t) must always be interpreted as the time of light arrival at the SSB, not as the time of light emission from the source."
Gaia's reference epoch is therefore ta, not tc; its published position is the apparent, retarded direction. The same standard model governs Hipparcos and the XHIP compilation derived from it (ESA SP-1200, Vol. 1, §1.2.8).
Why that is not a defect in the catalogue. For uniform rectilinear motion the light-time offset is exactly degenerate with the position parameter: b(ta − d/c) = [bep − v(d/c)] + v(ta − tep), which is again uniform rectilinear motion with the same velocity. No astrometric fit can separate the two terms, so no catalogue removes it — and removing it is not a correction of the catalogue but a change of convention applied to it. The rigorous transformation between apparent and kinematic parameters, light-time included, is given by Butkevich & Lindegren (2014).
What this registry does. A node's stored position is declared to be its position at coordinate epoch J2000, and the scene is a simultaneity slice in tc. Converting a catalogue row into that convention takes both terms, pos₀ = bcat + vhel[(J2000 − tep) + d/c], the first reconciling the epochs and the second removing the light-travel delay the standard model deliberately leaves in. Measured over the 56,399 stars carrying a measured heliocentric velocity, the second term subtends a median 19.6″ (p90 46″, p99 84″, max 353″) against the first term's median 2.9″; its angular size is v⊥/c independently of distance. Using the catalogue's apparent velocity in place of the kinematic one introduces a relative error vr/c ≲ 2×10−4, i.e. ≲ 0.004″ on a ~20″ term, so the first-order form is used and its omission is stated rather than assumed.
Epistemic status. b(tc) is not observable. The default view is therefore a model — the apparent path re-expressed under a declared simultaneity convention — while an observer view is nearer to the measurement, since from Earth it returns the catalogue's own directions. Neither is privileged; each is a stated convention, and every record says which one it is in.
Sources: Lindegren et al. 2012, A&A 538, A78 · Klioner 2003, AJ 125, 1580 · Butkevich & Lindegren 2014, A&A 570, A62 · Lindegren et al. 2021, A&A 649, A2 · Gaia Data Release documentation, Ch. 4 §4.1.4 · ESA SP-1200 (Hipparcos), Vol. 1 §1.2.8.
Most orbits here are propagated as a single fixed two-body ellipse from the catalogued elements. For the great majority of objects that is an excellent model. For a minority it is silently worthless, and until now nothing on the record said which was which.
The case that made it concrete: the Falcon 9 upper stage that is due to strike the Moon on 5 August 2026. On its stored ellipse it never comes within 39,000 km of the Moon — its apogee stops 15,500 km short of the lunar orbit. What drives it into the Moon is the repeated lunar tug that a two-body model has no term for. The drawn path and the real path are different curves.
So every orbit is now screened against the massive natural bodies sharing its frame: if it reaches inside a few Hill radii of one of them, the record says so, in the honest form — this is where a Kepler orbit would go, not a prediction of where the object will be. Across the shipped registry that flags 4,558 of 52,847 screened orbits (8.6%), of which 184 are Earth-orbiting objects that cross the Moon's reach. Reassuringly, the class it flags hardest is the near-Earth asteroid and comet population, which is defined by crossing — the screen agreeing with the catalogue.
Two limits are stated rather than discovered later. Crossing makes an encounter possible, not certain: inclination and phase can keep a crossing orbit clear for a long time. And the screen is gravitational only — solar radiation pressure on a light, large object matters enormously (it does for this very stage) and nothing here can see it, because the registry does not carry the area and mass it would need.
Two search facets follow from this, and they are deliberately kept apart.
has:crossing is our modelled geometry — the object's orbit
reaches inside a massive body's grip on some leg of its trajectory.
has:hazard is a catalogue's own classification, reached with
far more than we hold: NASA/JPL calls an asteroid potentially hazardous when its
minimum orbital intersection distance with Earth's orbit is under 0.05 au and
it is bright enough to be large. Merging the two would launder someone else's
careful ruling into our arithmetic, so they stay separate rows with separate
words.
Every object with an orbit now carries a third neighbourhood group, beside its children and its siblings: what could one day run into it — natural and artificial, counted, each name a click away.
The test is the same geometry read symmetrically. Two bodies sharing a primary can meet only if the bands of radii they sweep overlap, each widened by its own reach — a massive body's gravitational grip, or failing that its physical size, or failing that nothing at all rather than a guessed size. Over the long run that is the right test and a near-term one would be the wrong test: nodes and apsides precess at different rates, so the angular geometry eventually sweeps through every configuration, while the range of radii a body visits does not change.
What the list is. It is what is not excluded. The exclusion is the strong half — two bodies whose bands are disjoint cannot collide while these elements hold — and the membership is the weak half. The registry holds two-body orbits, so it can rule an encounter out and never rule one in; there is no probability here and none is offered. Where a catalogue has already ruled, that ruling appears as its own line, in its own words.
Where the criterion stops, and why it stops there. The natural question is whether passing into a body's Hill sphere is the gate. It is the gate for one thing and the wrong gate for another, and the distance between the two is the whole argument. The Hill radius is where the target's gravity beats its primary's tidal field — crossing it is the gate for the two-body model has stopped being predictive, a statement about our model. An impact needs the target's physical radius, the disc that must actually be struck, enlarged a little by gravitational focusing. For the Earth those two are about 1.5 million km and 6,371 km: the region where the model already fails is some two hundred times wider than the target, forty thousand times its area. So crossing the Hill sphere tells you the answer is no longer computable from these elements, and almost nothing about whether the object hits.
The verdict therefore has two values and no third. Excluded: the bands do not overlap, so no collision is possible while these elements hold — provable, and the strong half. Open: the bands overlap. Where the object reaches inside the target's gravitational grip the record marks it ⌖ and says the sharper thing — the answer is not merely unknown, it provably is not in this data. There is deliberately no "likely". Settling it needs an n-body integration with a covariance, which is what NASA/JPL's Sentry publishes; until such a source is ingested, no number is offered.
The criterion is sharp rather than permissive, which is what makes it useful: two exactly circular orbits five kilometres apart are excluded, whatever their phasing. A relation that answered "possible" there would put every satellite in every other satellite's list.
Measured on the shipped registry: Earth has 2,788 natural candidates (the near-Earth asteroid population) and 61 artificial; the Moon has 205 artificial — objects in Earth orbit whose paths reach lunar distance; the ISS shares its band with 5,345 catalogued objects; Phobos has none, and says so. Names are ranked by closeness in orbital size, because two bodies on nearly the same semi-major axis share a shell — that is a proximity order, not a risk order.
Two search facets and a range make the impact questions askable, and they
compose with everything else. has:impact is the set of objects whose
catalogued life ENDS by arriving at a body — a recorded impact, an orbit that
decays into re-entry or onto an airless surface, or a launch that fell straight
back. ends: is the calendar year that happens, the
counterpart of launched:. So ends:<2027 has:impact
is "about to hit something", and has:impact under:Moon is
everything whose life ends at the Moon.
The distinction that makes this honest: a record whose existence merely STOPS is not in either set. Measured on the shipped registry (2026-07-28): of the 33,808 records whose catalogued life has an end, 8,904 merely stop being recorded — 8,435 of them modelled solar-wind cones, plus launch sites, detonation marks and other dated windows. Reading the raw end date would have made "objects about to impact" mostly a list of expiring CME markers. The classifier reads the last leg of the trajectory instead: 89 catalogued impacts and 23,018 orbits that end at a body (together 22,978 at Earth, 77 at the Moon, 25 at Venus, 20 at Mars), plus 1,797 launches that fell back without reaching orbit. An ending ORBIT is an arrival; a bare window is not.
Tours can walk time, not just space. Ask the AI for a tour and it can anchor each stop to that object's OWN end date, with an offset — "walk me through the objects ten days before their impact on the Moon" stands the clock ten days before each one in turn, in date order. An object with no catalogued end date is still toured; the clock is simply left alone rather than moved on a guess.
The moment is marked. A catalogued impact or re-entry now
draws a brief flash where and when it happens (permalink if=0 turns
it off). What is real is the WHEN and the WHERE; the size and duration are chosen
to be visible — an actual impact flash would be far too small and far too brief to
see at any scale this scene is viewed at, and the page says so rather than letting
the mark imply a measurement.
Time is a dimension, and so is an object's life. Any phase chip or history moment on an object's record is a teleport: the clock jumps into that leg's time window and the scene re-parents to the era — a Mars rover sits under its launcher at launch week, under the Sun in cruise, on Mars after landing. The record marks WHERE in the life you are ("now k/N" on the phase row), and 35,036 catalogued objects carry a "separated from" lineage row — the parent object at the separation epoch, itself a teleport.
Guided tours. Five curated walks (a grand tour of the solar system · humanity's footprint · Apollo end-to-end · the Mars robots · the deep sky) step through registry objects at documented mission dates, with short captions; every stop is pinned against the shipped data.
Close-approach watch. A panel (permalink apw=1)
lists the catalogued close passes of Potentially Hazardous Asteroids
nearest the current clock, each row a teleport to the pass. The list is
of catalogued passes — a lower bound, never a completeness claim.
Passes overhead. A panel (permalink pass=1)
predicts when a satellite crosses the sky above a ground location YOU
provide — the ISS as the curated default, plus the selected object when
it is an Earth orbiter whose baked elements carry a current (Celestrak
GP) measured phase; an orbiter without current elements says so honestly
instead of guessing. Each pass row (rise · culmination · set, local +
UTC, elevation + compass azimuth) is a teleport to the culmination.
Your location is requested only when you press the button (or typed
manually), is stored on this device only, and by design never enters a
share link — the pass key carries panel visibility alone.
Predictions are geometric horizon passes computed from the baked mean
orbital elements — a dated snapshot, not live tracking: approximate
(minutes-level near the element epoch, degrading over weeks), with no
atmospheric refraction and no visibility/brightness claim.
Measuring distances. A 📏 measure control (Visualisation stage)
lets you pick any two objects — the next two selections — and draws a
ruler line between them with a live readout of their straight-line
separation at the sim clock (auto unit + light-travel time), computed
through the same position compose that renders the scene. Honesty rules:
an object that does not exist at the date is refused, never placed; a
spacecraft outside its dated trajectory data is flagged as riding its
last held data arc; a carried line-of-sight position uncertainty (the
distance-gated star layers' σd) is stated per endpoint, never
blended into a false combined precision. A connected AI answers the same
question by name — "what is the distance between Mars and Pluto in
1981?" — via its measure_distance tool (a bare year measures
at mid-year and reports the min–max range over that year). The ruler is
a live gesture tool and deliberately has no URL parameter.
Audience personas. The menu (the brand dropdown, or the phone ☰
sheet) carries a compact persona row — kid ·
classroom · researcher · vr-demo — each
a named bundle of existing display switches (UI level, labels,
trails, factory mode, star colours, twinkle, cinematic grade, eclipse
shadows, ±1σ and provenance sub-lines, constellation figures, analytical
panels). Applying one works exactly like loading a shared link: the view
settings are first restored to their defaults, then the bundle's parameters
are applied — nothing new is stored, and your selection, camera and clock
stay where they are. The ⟲ reset button restores the default configuration.
A connected AI can do the same by voice via its persona
option.
The 🔗 permalink serializes the whole view into the URL hash — defaults are omitted, unknown keys are ignored, and each parameter is applied best-effort so an old link keeps working. For reference, the complete key registry (defaults in parentheses):
| Keys | What they carry |
|---|---|
org · sel · fr · cd · cy · cp | identity + camera: active frame, selection, trail frame, camera distance/yaw/pitch (applied last) |
t · rate · play · vpx · aw · win | time: sim clock (JD), manual rate, playing, auto-speed target, adaptive time window on/off (aw=0), manual window bounds |
tn | “Now” as an INTENTION rather than a value. A shared link normally carries an absolute instant (t), which is the only correct encoding for a link that points at a dated event — an impact, an eclipse, a mission window — and the wrong one for a view that meant the present: opened tomorrow it shows yesterday’s sky, and the objects whose whole point is being on time (the station, a pass prediction, a live feed) go stale in silence. So tn=1 travels beside t and, applied after it, re-reads the clock at the READER’s present — paused, it rests there; playing, it starts there. Absolute stays the DEFAULT: tn is emitted only when the clock both was PUT at the present by an affordance that means it (the timeline’s NOW, go live, a “today” scene) and still IS the present when the link is written, so a clock scrubbed to a chosen date never travels as “now” however close that date is to today, and a view that has since played away from the present travels as the instant it actually shows. t is still written underneath, so a link minted before this key existed — or read by anything that ignores it — lands on exactly the same instant it always did. The timeline’s NOW control lights up precisely while a link would travel relative, so which clock is being shared is visible before it is copied; a live-share stream strips the mark, because a stream mirrors the lead’s clock rather than each follower’s. |
tr · tfh · tsp · tlj · trc · tss · tef | trails: mode (off/auto/max), full-history, traverse spline, launch join, seam reconnection, surface-trail suppression (each =0 to disable), and multi-frame trails tef (the selected object's extra ancestor frames, ~-joined ids — its motion re-composed in several frames at once; bound to the selection, so it reproduces alongside sel) |
tg · tln | trail time-ruler graduations (tg=1 — major + minor tick strokes at round calendar steps, a day/month/year/century… picked from the visible trail span; tg=2 — the same plus a date legend on the selected trail's major ticks; tg=3 — the same ticks labelled instead with the distance light covers in the look-back from the trail head, c·Δt, a relabelling and never a second ruler) and an imposed trail length in days (tln; absent = the automatic span election) |
tfa | Field trails — in trail mode AUTO at stellar/galactic scales, the visible star field (up to 48 stars with measured velocities, nearest the view) draws trails of one shared duration, so stroke length reads as speed. Stars without a measured velocity draw nothing, and the count of such refusals is reported. Kill switch tfa=0. |
fl | Named surface features — the IAU-approved names of natural features (craters, montes, valles, planitiae…) from the Gazetteer of Planetary Nomenclature, revealed as you approach a body. A name appears when the feature’s OWN diameter reaches the size at which this renderer stops treating a thing as a dot, so a 200 km mare is named from far out and a 5 km crater only from close in; proper names are read from further out than the source’s lettered “satellite feature” designations, which is why Einstein appears long before Einstein A. The features carry NO marker on purpose: a feature is a REGION tens or hundreds of kilometres across and the coordinate published for it is its centre by mapping convention, not a measured point, so a dot would overstate what was mapped — which is a different statement from a position we cannot recover, and reads differently. The Visualisation control states, from the layer’s own counts, how many of the body’s names are being shown, how many are lettered designations held back until close in, and how many carry no published diameter and so can never be size-ranked; a body with no names is a gap in the nomenclature, not in the ground. Kill switch fl=0. |
lg · ls · pin · vp · mil · mp · ma | labels + models: legend mode, label size, pinned labels, visual-provenance sub-lines, model card, model time-window swap, model attitude |
fa · unc · ms | factory mode (off/light/fill), ±1σ display, minor-body procedural shapes |
hz · hzm · hza · gs · rl · gw · sn · cn · dc · es · lit · if | modelled/derived overlays: habitable-zone rings + method + overlay-all, Hill spheres, Roche limits, gravitational-wave shells, supernova light shells, native constellations per sky culture — one or several overlaid (cn=western · cn=chinese · cn=western+chinese …; legacy cn=1 = western, an unknown member is dropped, all-unknown = off) with the optional figure-names legend cnl (cnl=1 shows on-sky figure names + the selected star's membership row), CME cones, eclipse shadows (es=0 hides), real lighting (lit=1 — non-emitting bodies lit from their host star's actual direction: a day/night terminator with correct phase; the star is the nearest bound ancestor star, stars themselves stay emitters, and a faint fixed ambient keeps the night side readable — a display aid, not physics) |
terr · si · cld · ll · cm · va · cl · sb | layers & dressing: sourced terrain (terr=0 hides), Sun imagery by date (si=1), Earth clouds, Life & Water, concept missions, velocity arrows, comm links (ON by default since 2026-07-30 — cl=0 hides; older links carrying cl=1 still read as on), spectrum band |
cf | the three Cosmic Footprint GATES — which categories of human footprint are shown: m material · e electromagnetic · b biological, joined in one value as the OPEN set. The default is m alone (material shown, electromagnetic and biological hidden) and is omitted from a link; cf=meb opens all three and cf=- shuts all three. Unknown letters are ignored. See the three gates below for what each holds |
stc · cc · tw · vg | display grade: measured star colors — star points in the black-body hue of their catalogued temperature (stc=0 restores the coarser banded tints; stars without a published teff always keep the default look), cinematic ACES color grade (cc=1, an optional look), star twinkle (tw=1; pauses itself under reduced-motion or a slipping frame rate), vignette frame (vg=1) |
so | star trajectory line for the selected star: so=drift = its MEASURED space velocity extrapolated linearly (the registry's own position law); so=gal = a MODELLED test-particle orbit integrated in a published Milky Way potential (Irrgang et al. 2013 Model I, DOI — not a Kepler ellipse: the Galaxy's extended mass keeps the rotation curve near-flat, Eilers et al. 2019, DOI). DEFAULT since v2.106 (owner): the galactic orbit is ON — so=off disables, so=drift selects the linear law; stars without a measured full 3-D velocity get no line, with the reason stated (A5). Velocity-frame convention: a star's drift = its measured heliocentric velocity + the Sun's full galactocentric motion — vc = 229 km/s (Eilers et al. 2019) + the solar peculiar motion (U,V,W)⊙ = (11.10, 12.24, 7.25) km/s (Schönrich et al. 2010, DOI) |
vch | vector chain (vch=1) — the gravitational nesting drawn in the scene as a tip-to-tail VECTOR SUM: one labelled arrow per frame-to-frame displacement of the selected object's time-aware ancestor chain (CMB → Local Group → … → the object), each leg from the simulation's own position compose, so the arrows visibly sum to where the object is. Legs too small to see at the current zoom are skipped and counted on an honest note (a 100 m offset is invisible from a galactic viewpoint — A5); display-only. Default off; the toggle sits in the Object panel directly below the gravitational tree |
lgd | Local Group dynamics: by default (omitted) the MODELLED few-body motion of the massive Local Group members is ON — Andromeda (M31) and Triangulum (M33) MOVE along the mutual gravitational orbit integrated from their MEASURED present-day velocities (van der Marel et al. 2012, HST proper motions, DOI), so scrubbing the clock into deep time shows Andromeda approaching the Milky Way (the timing-argument first passage in ~4 Gyr — Kahn & Woltjer 1959, DOI) and its Gy-scale trail draws the approach. lgd=static freezes them at their present positions (the byte-identical baseline). The Milky Way is the fixed frame anchor; the LMC/SMC and dwarf galaxies are not moved; softened point masses with no dynamical friction, so the first approach is representative but the eventual merger is not modelled (A5) |
obs · ov | observer view: obs=<object> redraws the whole scene as that object's APPARENT sky — every position light-time retarded by its own τ, and an event existing only once its light has reached the observer (from Earth, SN 1054 appears in 1054, not at its −5470 explosion). Absent = the default true-simultaneity view (the kill switch); an observer unknown to the current bake is refused by the engine and the link degrades silently to the default (A5 — never a fabricated observer). ov=1 adds the SUPERPOSITION: the global-time copy, tinted cold blue, drawn only where it visibly differs from the apparent position (the observer's sky keeps natural colours); meaningful only with obs= and it travels only while actually on. This makes an observer view SHAREABLE — a link to the TRAPPIST sky as seen from Earth reproduces it |
lock · nu · ol · arf · zc · zr · ze · zf · psc | camera behaviour: surface lock, north-up, orbit follow, auto-reframe, zoom target cascade, zoom relevance floor (zr=0 restores the legacy 100 m floor — by default a childless star stops at the scale of its stellar neighbourhood, with an honest "nothing closer in the registry" note; a childless galaxy-cluster marker stops at its own MODELLED R500 extent, derived from its published SZ mass by the overdensity definition M500 = (4/3)π·500·ρcrit(z)·R500³, stated as modelled in the note), local-environment zoom (ze=1, experimental, off by default: arriving at a childless star parks the view at its stellar neighbourhood — the gap to its nearest catalogued neighbour fills half the view — and zooming toward the relevance floor decelerates smoothly on the constant-feel law instead of hard-stopping), constant-feel zoom, play-stride cull |
sf | FACTORY full-system fill overlay: sf=1 draws, for the selected host star (or a planet in its system), the statistically-EXPECTED unseen planetary members as SYNTHETIC orbit ellipses — a deterministic seeded draw from published Kepler occurrence grids (Fressin et al. 2013, DOI · Dressing & Charbonneau 2015, DOI), constrained by the known planets (occupied class×period cells never re-drawn) and a Δ ≥ 10 mutual-Hill spacing criterion (Pu & Wu 2015, DOI). Never a claim about THIS system. Default off; the dice re-rolls the seed (session-side — a shared link reproduces the canonical draw) and the paper pack sfp swaps the cited coefficient table (a chosen non-default literature pack travels so a saved view reproduces it); a host without a measured mass+temperature gets nothing, with the reason stated (A5) |
ur · lt · eb · cv · ce · apw · pass · ds | analytical panels: UN registration, launches over time, EM-band census, measurement coverage, presence census, close-approach watch (apw=1; legacy aw=1 links still open it), passes overhead (pass=1 — visibility only; the observer's ground location itself never travels in a link, by design), data sources |
hr · sc | accepted for link compatibility; the HR-diagram and orbital-congestion panels are currently not mounted, so these flags have no visible effect |
fx · hl | the filter-badge stack (each badge's action/colour/trail/label/unknown/blink/size-boost markers + query) and hidden source layers |
tier · theme · hi · ui | interface: UI level (0 ultra-low … high), theme profile, humanity-ink colour override, ui=0 chrome-less render (never serialized into a shared link) |
tq · kft | tours: a query-driven tour itinerary, and a shared keyframe-tour token (apply-only) |
Embed mode. Adding ?embed=1 to the simulation URL
(a query parameter, deliberately not part of the shareable hash) renders
the scene alone with a small corner wordmark — for embedding the view in
another page.
The Share stage carries a “keep available offline” toggle. ON, it saves — into this browser only — the application shell, the full registry bake (roughly 62 MB raw — about 15 MB compressed in transfer) and these documentation pages, with a visible progress and size readout; a partial save is reported as incomplete, never as ready. The copy is a dated snapshot: pages refresh themselves when you are online, and a “↻ refresh copy” button re-snapshots the data files after a new release. OFF removes the worker and deletes everything saved. What is honestly not saved: third-party streams — NASA/USGS surface tiles, live solar/rover imagery, map tiles and CDN-hosted libraries, and cloud AI providers — which degrade offline exactly as they do on any network failure. The toggle is a device-local preference and deliberately has no URL parameter (it is meaningless in a shared link). The local ranked search works fully offline, with a small typo tolerance (“did you mean …” on a zero-hit query); best supported on Chrome-class browsers — iOS Safari may evict saved copies under storage pressure (the prepared date shows so a stale copy is visible).
The registry is free and needs no account. So that the project can know how many distinct people it reaches, a visit counter runs on page load, and after about ten visits a dismissible invitation offers to create an account with an email address. It is deliberately a gentle wall: “continue without an account” always works, nothing is ever withheld, and every failure path is silent — if the counter cannot be reached, the page simply carries on.
Your IP address is never stored and never logged. When the counting endpoint receives a request it converts the address, one way, into a pseudonym — HMAC-SHA256 keyed with a secret held only on the server, truncated to 16 hexadecimal characters — and stores that; the address itself is never written to a database or a log, and the pseudonym cannot be reversed without the secret. Alongside it: a coarse two-letter country code, and an email address only if you type one and tick the consent box. No cookies for tracking, no advertising, no analytics broker, no device fingerprint, no user agent, no referrer. The honest trade-off — the secret is stable rather than rotated daily, because “your tenth visit” cannot be counted across days otherwise — is stated in full, with the GDPR basis and your rights, in the privacy notice.
Off unless a backend is configured. This is the project's one
explicit, owner-authorised exception to its otherwise zero-backend
architecture, and it is deliberately bounded: the registry itself holds
no part of it — no registry data lives in the service, and the
simulation runs unchanged without it. The page reads its endpoint from a
single ssr-api-base meta tag; when that is empty — as it is on
any build with no service deployed — nothing is sent anywhere at all and the
counter degrades to a purely local tally in your own browser's storage. The
counter has no URL parameter by design (it is meaningless in a shared
link).
The statistics page (/admin.html) is for the project
maintainer. Its short reveal code only un-hides the login form and is
explicitly not a security boundary — the real gate is a server-side
login returning a short-lived signed token, and no statistic reaches a
browser without it.
Every conversational and voice feature runs against your own model credentials (an Anthropic, OpenAI or Mistral API key), entered and stored locally in your browser and sent only to the provider you chose — never to us; we ship no model, pay for no inference and hold no key. A running session shows an estimated token cost. Note that a conversation here is not private to this site: your prompts go to your chosen provider under that provider's terms.
On-device AI is the default. Where the browser ships a built-in on-device model (Chrome 138+ Prompt API, after its one-time model download), the assistant answers with THAT model first — no key, no cost per question, nothing leaving the device, working on first load. A key is an upgrade, not the price of entry: enter one and you can prefer it, and if the on-device model cannot answer, the keyed provider is tried next. Either way the reply says which model produced it, because a weaker answer that does not admit being one would be worse than no answer.
The honest trade: the built-in model is nano-class — good for spoken commands (“go to Mars”, “show trails”, “tour the objects about to hit something”) and markedly weaker than the cloud models at multi-step tool use. It drives the exact same firewalled tool surface. Where the API is absent, a key is needed and the empty state says so.
The assistant can READ, not just act. It can ask the registry what is known about a named object — its source catalogue, its measured values with their uncertainties, which clock its position is on, when and how its life ends — and it is instructed to pass on what is not known too, because "no measured mass" is an answer and dropping it would teach you that everything is measured. It can also ask what dated events sit near the current moment, so it can offer you something you had no way to know to ask for.
The AI also understands the PROJECT itself: a self-description tool returns what the registry is, the epistemic rules it must respect (provenance, absence-of-data ≠ absence), and a live capability map — every installed data module with its identity card, and the current tool/option/facet tallies — all composed from the running engine at call time, so a database that connects is understood the moment it connects.
The AI discovers the search vocabulary LIVE: its category tool returns
the real facet grammar with plain-language notes, live object counts and
French/English synonyms ("œil nu" → has:nakedeye),
derived at call time from the same declared surfaces the human search
palette indexes — so a newly added facet is immediately usable by voice,
and a failed query returns corrective suggestions instead of silence.
The AI drives only the existing public control surface through
structured tools — navigate, time, speed, camera, filter badges, tours,
time-aware distance measurement (measure_distance),
and a generic options table — and, by architecture, never sees or emits
internal identifiers and has no path to source code or the registry's
truth. The full option vocabulary it (and you, by voice) can set:
trails full-history-trails smooth-rover-trails
launch-joins reconnect-trails surface-trail-suppress
trail-rulers trail-length trail-frames
field-trails feature-names
play-stride-cull model-attitude visual-provenance-labels
model-info-label model-phase-swap labels
factory uncertainty hz-rings hz-method
hz-all-methods hill-spheres roche-limits
gravitational-wave-shells supernova-shells impact-flash constellations constellation-names cme-cones
eclipse-shadows real-lighting terrain sun-imagery
star-colors cinematic-color twinkle vignette
earth-clouds comm-links velocity-arrows star-orbit
footprint-material footprint-electromagnetic footprint-biological
observer vector-chain system-fill lg-dynamics
concept-missions life-water surface-lock
north-up orbit-follow auto-frame zoom-floor zoom-env
auto-speed zoom-cascade zoom-feel
spectrum-band spectrum-strip slideshow-loop
census-panel approach-panel passes-panel coverage-panel
sources-panel un-registration-panel launches-panel
em-band-panel help-panel search-panel
connect-ai-panel bring-your-data-panel ui-level
persona theme humanity-color clear-labels
clear-badges tour
What is physical, what is visual. Positions, orbits, time windows, emission kinematics and detection ranges come from data or declared models. The DRESSING — animated sun surfaces, atmosphere rims, departure animations (smoke streaks, mushroom/fireball stagings), deposition ellipses — is VISUAL: physically scaled where a published fit exists (each one referenced in the library), but rendered to be read, not to simulate. Estimated values appear in gold with their method.
EM emissions render as expanding shells at the speed of light (radius = c·Δt since transmission; a continuous broadcast is a filled sphere, a radio-telescope message a needle-thin cone along its real beam). One record shape covers a METI carrier, a nuclear EMP, a pulsar and the quiet Sun — natural and artificial in one visual language, the natural beacons giving the human signals their context. Detection ranges (humanity's best instruments vs a parameterized ETI photon limit) are computed in the registry at bake and shown per emission in the inspector — estimates labeled MODELLED.
This page documents sources, licenses and intent. It is deliberately insufficient to rebuild the system: the authoritative engineering specification is access-controlled in the application.