SolarSystemRegistry.org — Documentation

⚠ 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.

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. 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.

Classifying the footprint — a tentative working scheme

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 class — roughly, how far a footprint can reach: mission (reach bounded to an object or body) · biotope (reach into one planetary environment, where planetary protection is the concern) · uncontained (reach outward as light/radio, where little governance exists). We offer this only to make the very uneven state of oversight easier to see, not to assert any conclusion about it. Filter with containment:mission, containment:biotope, containment:uncontained.
• Vector — the carrier the object is: engineered-object · fragment (debris, spent stages) · effluent · biological · electromagnetic (signals) · energetic (nuclear) · kinetic (impacts). Filter with vector:fragment, etc.
• Originator class — very roughly, who operated the object: 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.

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, 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 over the shipped bake: 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.

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

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 weekly cycle (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.

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: 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 → 100 years; automatic by default). 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.

Moving through time and lives

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' σ_d) 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.

Sharing & URL parameters

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):

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.

Working offline — an optional, explicit copy

The Share stage carries a “keep available offline” toggle. ON, it saves — into this browser only — the application shell, the full registry bake (roughly 40 MB raw) 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).

Connecting an AI — bring your own key

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.

Offline, on-device AI. Where the browser ships a built-in on-device model (Chrome 138+ Prompt API, after its one-time model download) and the device has no network, the assistant automatically runs against that local model instead — no key, no cost, and nothing leaves the device. It is a small nano-class model: good for simple spoken commands (“go to Mars”, “show trails”), far weaker than the cloud models, and it drives the exact same firewalled tool surface. Where the API is absent, nothing changes.

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 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 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 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.