Satellite Location · Entry VII

Small Worlds

Heliocentric Map

A different kind of entry — not body-centered, but a connected ensemble of every small body that humanity has rendezvoused with, sampled, or is currently visiting. 11 bodies span the Aten / Apollo NEOs, the main belt, the Jupiter Trojans, and short- and long-period comets — Bennu, Ryugu, Itokawa (sample-return); Eros, Ceres, Vesta (orbited + landed); Apophis, Psyche, 67P, Didymos (active missions in residence or arriving 2026 – 2029); 1P/Halley as the 1986 armada highlight. 13 spacecraft trajectories drawn as heliocentric transfer arcs from launch through every published gravity assist or rendezvous waypoint.

Small body elements: JPL Small-Body Database · Spacecraft tour waypoints: mission status pages, JPL Horizons · Frame: heliocentric ecliptic J2000, units = AU · Kinetic sibling to the RAVEN Sample Provenance Atlas
6
NEOs Visited
3
Main Belt
2
Comets
13
Spacecraft Tours
4
Sample Returns
5
Active 2026

Every other entry in this series is body-centered. This one is the exception — there is no one small world to put at the origin, so the Sun goes there instead and the small bodies fly past it. The catalog is the lineage of sample return and rendezvous: NEAR Shoemaker's 2001 surface descent on Eros, Hayabusa's 2005 touchdown on Itokawa, Hayabusa2 / Ryugu, OSIRIS-REx / Bennu, Dawn's 2011 – 2018 tour of Vesta and Ceres, Rosetta's two years orbiting comet 67P, the 1986 international armada at Halley, DART hammering Dimorphos in 2022 and Hera arriving for the post-impact assessment in late 2026, and the in-flight extensions — OSIRIS-APEX redirected to Apophis (2029), Psyche en route to (16) Psyche (2029), Hayabusa2 extended to 1998 KY26 (2031), Lucy mid-tour through the Jupiter Trojans. Time controls let you scrub from 1985 (Vega 1 / 2 + Giotto launches toward Halley) through 2035 (Lucy completes its second Trojan visit). The orbits and the spacecraft tours animate together — you can watch the Hera trajectory chase the Didymos / Dimorphos system inward and the Lucy spacecraft kink off the ecliptic toward the L4 Trojan cloud.

RAVEN Satellite Location · Small Worlds

Heliocentric Ecliptic · J2000 Frame

Sun at origin. Units = AU. Small body markers are massively oversized for visibility (real diameters are 0.2 – 940 km). Use Inner / Main Belt / Trojan presets to step across the dynamic range.

Layers

Clock

UTC—
JD (TDB)—
Year—
Earth heliocentric λ—
Time accel.×8.6M
Inner NEOs orbit in ~1 yr; main belt asteroids in 3.6 – 5 yr; 67P returns every 6.4 yr; Halley once every 75 yr. Scrub to 2029 to watch OSIRIS-APEX arrive at Apophis and Psyche arrive at its target.

Camera Presets

simulated — · Kepler elements + spacecraft transfer arcs
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Catalog

Near-Earth Objects 6 · sampled or in residence

Main-Belt Asteroids 3

Comets 2 · 67P and Halley

Spacecraft Tours 13

How the Positions Are Computed

Bodies

Each small body is propagated as a single Keplerian ellipse from JPL Small-Body Database osculating elements, retrieved 2026-08-20. Every body carries its own epoch — the asteroids are on the current 2026-06-09 solution, Bennu on its 2011-01-01 solution, and the comets on the apparition epochs SBDB publishes for them (67P 2015-10-10, Halley 1968-01-20). Kepler's third law gives T(yr) = a(AU)^1.5 for solar two-body. Planetary perturbations and cometary non-gravitational forces are ignored. For the asteroids that is a sub-promille effect and the orbits are exact within the resolution of the screen for several decades either side of epoch. For the comets it is not: two-body propagation across a perihelion passage accumulates real error, so treat Halley and 67P as accurate near their own apparitions and indicative elsewhere. Halley is correctly retrograde (i = 162.3°). Body radii in this catalog span ~0.1 km (Itokawa) to ~470 km (Ceres) — three orders of magnitude — and are dramatically oversized in the rendering for visibility.

Spacecraft trajectories

Each spacecraft tour is a polyline through a sequence of heliocentric waypoints: launch position (Earth at launch date), every published gravity assist (Earth flyby, Venus flyby, Mars flyby, body flyby), and rendezvous / arrival positions at each visited body. Each waypoint is computed from the corresponding body's Keplerian position at the date, and adjacent waypoints are joined by a ballistic transfer arc rather than a straight chord: the two heliocentric position vectors define the transfer plane, the craft is swept through it prograde, the heliocentric distance is eased from the departure radius to the arrival radius, and whole revolutions are added when the flight time is long compared with the mean orbital period of the transfer. The result is a geometrically simplified rendering — it is not the true osculating transfer ellipse, and it does not resolve the deep-space manoeuvres between flybys — but it travels in the correct direction, takes a plausible number of laps around the Sun for the flight time, and shows every flyby and rendezvous in correct heliocentric position. Tours that are still in residence at a body have a marker drawn at the current heliocentric position of that body; tours that have ended (Rosetta deorbited into 67P, Dawn graveyard-orbited around Ceres) have the marker at the final body.

Scope

The 11 bodies here are those that humanity has either landed on, rendezvoused with, sampled, or has an active mission arriving at within 2026 – 2029. Other visited bodies (Tempel 1, Wild 2, Hartley 2, Borrelly, Šteins, Lutetia, Donaldjohanson, the five Lucy Trojans en route) are catalogued in the Sample Provenance Atlas but not rendered here to keep the scene legible. A future revision may promote Lucy's Trojan targets to renderable bodies once the spacecraft is in residence at each.

References

  1. JPL Small-Body Database Browser — canonical orbital elements for every numbered asteroid and comet
  2. Veverka, J. et al. 2001 — NEAR Shoemaker landing on Eros, Nature 413
  3. Yano, H. et al. 2006 — Hayabusa touch-down on Itokawa, Science 312
  4. Watanabe, S. et al. 2019 — Hayabusa2 arrival at Ryugu, Science 364
  5. Lauretta, D. S. et al. 2017 — OSIRIS-REx mission overview, Space Sci. Rev. 212
  6. Russell, C. T. & Raymond, C. A. 2012 — Dawn mission overview, Science 336
  7. Glassmeier, K.-H. et al. 2007 — Rosetta mission overview, Space Sci. Rev. 128
  8. Sagdeev, R. Z. & Zakharov, A. V. 1989 — The Soviet contribution to the Halley armada, Nature 341
  9. Reinhard, R. 1986 — Giotto encounter with Halley, Nature 321
  10. Cheng, A. F. et al. 2023 — DART kinetic-impactor demonstration, Nature 616
  11. Michel, P. et al. 2022 — Hera mission to the Didymos system, PSJ 3
  12. Levison, H. F. et al. 2021 — Lucy mission overview, Space Sci. Rev. 217
  13. Elkins-Tanton, L. T. et al. 2022 — Psyche mission overview, Space Sci. Rev. 218
  14. Kawaguchi, J. et al. 2008 — Hayabusa mission summary, Acta Astron. 62
  15. JPL Horizons — spacecraft ephemerides for every tour waypoint

Seventh entry in the RAVEN Satellite Location series · v1 · 2026-05-13