The Solar System · Maps · R.A.V.E.N. Research Labs

Every known body in the solar system, where it is right now

All 1.55 million cataloged asteroids and comets from JPL's daily small-body element export, propagated to the current instant on the GPU, with the eight planets from JPL's published Keplerian elements. The interplanetary medium rides on top: the Parker spiral pitched by the solar wind speed measured at L1 minutes ago, and every coronal mass ejection analyzed by NASA's DONKI in the past week, shown in transit. Live rivers feed the panels — close approaches in the next 30 days, last night's unconfirmed NEO candidates, the Sentry impact-risk list, and current comet brightness from worldwide observers.

JPL SSD · CNEOS · MPC NEOCP · NASA DONKI · NOAA SWPC · COBS

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Bodies mapped

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Approaches 30d

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On NEOCP now

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Solar wind at L1

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CMEs 7d

What you're looking at

Three data tiers share one heliocentric ecliptic J2000 frame. Runtime physics: planets and small bodies are propagated from published osculating elements at render time — the map is current by construction, at any instant you scrub to. Daily catalogs: the small-body element set is JPL's daily SBDB export, re-packed nightly by Scripts/fetch_solar_system.py. Live streams: six feeds proxied and cached by solar_system_server.py so one upstream call serves a whole classroom; every feed falls back to its last-good snapshot if the network drops. Lamp strip at the bottom of the stage shows each feed's age.

Small-body catalog

daily

ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/dat/ELEMENTS.{NUMBR,UNNUM,COMET}

JPL's daily export of the full Small-Body Database: every numbered and unnumbered asteroid plus all comets, as osculating Keplerian elements at per-object epochs. Stored verbatim in a 57 MB binary pack; the GPU solves Kepler's equation for all 1.55M bodies every frame.

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Close approaches

1 h refresh

ssd-api.jpl.nasa.gov/cad.api · next 30 d · < 0.1 AU

CNEOS close-approach predictions: every cataloged object passing within 0.1 AU of Earth in the next thirty days, with nominal distance and relative velocity. Numbered objects can be flown to on the map.

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NEO Confirmation Page

15 min refresh

minorplanetcenter.net/Extended_Files/neocp.json

The Minor Planet Center's list of just-discovered NEO candidates awaiting confirmation — objects found hours ago that have no orbit yet, which is exactly why they appear in the panel and not on the map. The frontier of the catalog, refreshed continuously.

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Sentry risk list

12 h refresh

ssd-api.jpl.nasa.gov/sentry.api

JPL's automatic impact-monitoring system: every object with a nonzero computed impact probability over the next century, with Palermo scale values. Currently above 1,700 objects, nearly all at vanishingly small probabilities; the live lamp shows the exact count.

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Solar wind at L1

5 min refresh

sohoftp.nascom.nasa.gov/sdb/goes/ace/daily/<date>_ace_swepam_1m.txt

ACE's SWEPAM instrument at L1, sampled once a minute, read from NASA Goddard's mirror of the real-time stream. The most recent measured wind speed sets the pitch of the Parker spiral drawn on the map — the actual interplanetary magnetic field geometry, minutes old. Read from the NASA mirror rather than NOAA SWPC because SWPC's server is behind a CDN that refuses this host outright; the measurement is the same one, from the same spacecraft.

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CMEs in transit

1 h refresh

kauai.ccmc.gsfc.nasa.gov/DONKI/WS/get/CMEAnalysis

NASA DONKI's analyzed CME cone parameters (launch time, direction, half-angle, speed) for the past seven days, extrapolated ballistically from 21.5 R☉ at the analyzed speed. Each wedge on the map is a real ejection currently crossing the inner system.

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Comet brightness

6 h refresh

cobs.si/api/comet_list.api

The Comet Observation Database's current-magnitude estimates from worldwide observers. Comets brighter than m≈12 get a glow and an anti-sunward tail hint scaled by brightness, so tonight's observable comets stand out.

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Living literature

6 h refresh

arXiv API · Crossref · ADS (token-gated)

Six curated streams keyed to this map's layers — small-body census, NEOs, Rubin/LSST, interstellar objects, TNOs, interplanetary medium — with anchor references pinned and Crossref errata watches on the anchors. Open the drawer on the stage.

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Reading the map honestly

Every small-body position is a two-body propagation of JPL's published osculating elements from that object's own epoch — the standard use these daily files are published for. For well-observed objects the error at the current epoch is far below a pixel at map scale; for single-opposition objects with decades-old epochs the position is correspondingly uncertain, exactly as it is in the catalog itself. Planetary positions use JPL's published approximate Keplerian elements (valid 1800–2050, arcminute-level). The Parker spiral is the textbook Archimedean geometry pitched by the live measured wind speed; CME wedges extrapolate DONKI's published cone parameters at constant speed — a deliberately simple, clearly-labeled kinematic sketch, not an MHD simulation. Nothing on this page re-derives, re-fits, or transforms a published value beyond unit conversion and propagation along its own published orbit.

The outer system and the heliosphere. Dwarf planets are drawn from their own packed elements with full orbits and labels (Ceres, Pluto, Eris, Makemake, Haumea, Sedna, Quaoar, Orcus, Gonggong). The Kuiper belt is the Trans-Neptunian layer — 6,053 cataloged TNOs, size-boosted in the shader because the population is sparse; use the Kuiper view preset. Interstellar objects 2I/Borisov and 3I/ATLAS carry labeled hyperbolic trajectories (±8 yr around perihelion) from their published orbits; 1I/ʻOumuamua sits in the hyperbolic-asteroid class, unlabeled in v1 because the pack carries no designation strings. The heliosphere shells are drawn spherical at the Voyager 1 crossing radii — termination shock 94.0 AU (Stone et al. 2005; V2 crossed at 83.7 AU, Stone et al. 2008) and heliopause 121.6 AU (Gurnett et al. 2013; V2 at 119.0 AU, Richardson et al. 2019). The real boundaries are anisotropic and breathe with the solar cycle — the V1/V2 asymmetry shown in the labels is itself the evidence. Voyager positions are Horizons vectors stamped 2026-06-10.

References & data sources

Data sources — daily catalogs

JPL Solar System Dynamics — daily osculating-element exports: ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/sb/orbits.html (ELEMENTS.NUMBR, ELEMENTS.UNNUM, ELEMENTS.COMET; regenerated daily from the Small-Body Database). Elements stored verbatim; deg→rad only.

JPL SBDB orbit-class definitions: ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/sb/orbit_class.html — applied verbatim for layer classification. Audit 2026-06-10: this map's classifier reproduces JPL's own class assignment for 1,538/1,538 sampled objects (100%) across all 11 classes via the SBDB Query API.

Comet display grouping: traditional period classification (P < 20 yr Jupiter-family; 20–200 yr Halley-type; > 200 yr long-period; e ≥ 1 parabolic/hyperbolic). Convention only — cf. Levison 1996 (ASP Conf. 107, 173) for the Tisserand-parameter alternative.

Data sources — live streams

CNEOS Close-Approach Data API: ssd-api.jpl.nasa.gov/doc/cad.html

JPL SBDB Lookup API (per-object click cards — full-precision solution, physical parameters, fetched live and cached 7 d): ssd-api.jpl.nasa.gov/doc/sbdb.html; per-object literature via NASA ADS API (token) or arXiv API (fallback), cached 24 h

JPL Sentry impact-monitoring API (v2): ssd-api.jpl.nasa.gov/doc/sentry.html

IAU Minor Planet Center, NEO Confirmation Page: minorplanetcenter.net NEOCP (JSON extended file)

NOAA Space Weather Prediction Center, Real-Time Solar Wind (DSCOVR/ACE at L1): swpc.noaa.gov/products/real-time-solar-wind

NASA CCMC DONKI — Space Weather Database Of Notifications, Knowledge, Information: kauai.ccmc.gsfc.nasa.gov/DONKI (CME cone analyses referenced to 21.5 R☉)

COBS — Comet Observation Database, Crni Vrh Observatory (Zakrajšek & Mikuž): cobs.si

Methods & constants

Standish, E.M. — Keplerian Elements for Approximate Positions of the Major Planets (JPL/Caltech), Table 1, valid 1800–2050: ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/planets/approx_pos.html. Audit: Earth/Jupiter/Neptune positions verified against Horizons to 1×10⁻⁴ / 3×10⁻³ / 5×10⁻³ AU at the current epoch — the documented accuracy of the table.

JPL Horizons ephemeris system (Giorgini, J.D. et al. 1996, BAAS 28, 1158): ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/horizons — verification reference and Voyager position source. Audit: pack propagation matches Horizons vectors for Ceres, Apophis, and Eris to ≤ 2×10⁻⁵ AU.

Constants: Gaussian gravitational constant k = 0.01720209895 rad day⁻¹ (IAU 1938/1976 definition); 1 AU = 1.495978707×10⁸ km (IAU 2012); lunar distance 384,400 km = 2.570×10⁻³ AU; sidereal Carrington rotation 25.38 d.

Kepler's equation solved by Newton–Raphson: 8 fixed iterations per body per frame in the GPU vertex shader (asteroids); 12-iteration adaptive form on CPU (comets, picking), with Barker's equation (e ≈ 1) and the hyperbolic form (e > 1) for unbound orbits.

Heliosphere & interplanetary medium

Parker, E.N. 1958, ApJ 128, 664 — Dynamics of the interplanetary gas and magnetic fields (the spiral geometry drawn here, pitched by the live measured wind speed)

Stone, E.C. et al. 2005, Science 309, 2017 — Voyager 1 termination-shock crossing at 94.0 AU (2004 Dec 16)

Stone, E.C. et al. 2008, Nature 454, 71 — Voyager 2 termination-shock crossing at 83.7 AU (2007 Aug; the north–south asymmetry quoted on the map)

Gurnett, D.A. et al. 2013, Science 341, 1489 — Voyager 1 heliopause crossing at 121.6 AU (2012 Aug)

Richardson, J.D. et al. 2019, Nature Astronomy 3, 1019 — Voyager 2 heliopause crossing at 119.0 AU (2018 Nov 5); Gurnett, D.A. & Kurth, W.S. 2019, Nature Astronomy 3, 1024 — plasma-density confirmation at 119.7 AU

Voyager 1 & 2 present positions: JPL Horizons heliocentric vectors, stamped 2026-06-10 (V1 ≈ 171 AU, V2 ≈ 143 AU)

Odstrcil, D. 2003, Adv. Space Res. 32, 497 — ENLIL heliosphere model (context for DONKI cone parameters; not run here)

Literature-panel anchors

Granvik, M. et al. 2018, Icarus 312, 181 — debiased NEO orbit and absolute-magnitude distributions

Bannister, M.T. et al. 2018, ApJS 236, 18 — OSSOS complete data release (TNO stream)

Every known body in the solar system, where it is right now

What you're looking at

The solar system, at this instant

Layers

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Reading the map honestly

References & data sources

Data sources — daily catalogs

Data sources — live streams

Methods & constants

Heliosphere & interplanetary medium

Literature-panel anchors