SolarSystemRegistry.org — Documentation

⚠ In development — prototype · Project management and author: Adrien Normier · 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

What this is

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. It exists to place what humanity does 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.

Uncertainty & confidence — how error bars are tracked

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:

• Model. Each record holds an optional 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.
• Honesty (A5). A sigma is present only where a source measured it or the factory propagated it. Absent means unknown — never silently zero, never invented. So "± 20 m" is a real measurement and a missing bar is an honest "we don't know".
• Display. The record card shows the value with its bar and, when large enough to matter, the relative size — e.g. a near-Earth asteroid's radius 170 m ± 20 m (12%) next to its orbital elements known to one part in a billion. Values are shown to a precision matched to their uncertainty.
• The precision gate (I15). The relative uncertainty (sigma/value) is a first-class, queryable quantity; a 1% gate decides when a value is "precise enough" to rely on (it already governs which stars enter the catalogue).
• Propagation. When the factory fits or estimates a value, it carries the uncertainty through by first-order propagation (sigma_f = root-sum-square of each input's contribution), so an estimate states its own confidence — and drops a term it cannot quantify rather than guessing.
• Cost. Tracking is computed at ingest/bake and read only on demand (the inspected object), so it adds zero per-frame cost; it scales to every object in the registry. Heavier visual error bars (a position-error ellipsoid, a banded orbit) render only for the one selected object.

Today the near-Earth asteroid set carries full orbital + size error bars from JPL; more sources and the visual error bars follow on the same spine. Find them with the has:uncertainty search.

Guiding principles

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.

How it is built — the five blocks

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.

Data sources, citations & licenses

1) Natural setting

The cosmos as it is without us — the stage every artificial object is measured against.

2) Artificial elements

Humanity's footprint — every object, signal and scar we have put into space or sent through it.

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.

Reading the scene

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. 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.

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.