Orrery

Also check out Orrery3D ✨

Visualization showing the orbits of minor planets and their discovery over time.

Two daily updated datasets are used to extract the orbital elements and discovery circumstances of minor planets. The data used is maintained by The Minor Planet Center (MPC):

• The MPC Orbit (MPCORB) Database Database containing orbital elements of minor planets.
• NumberedMPs.txt Discovery circumstances of the minor planets.

How to use

Install dependencies:

npm install

Start server:

npm run serve

Build and bundle:

npm run build

Watch changes and rebuild:

npm run watch

Deploy to gh-pages:

npm run deploy

Get updated data

Data files are stored in the data directory. You can either download the data files manually using the links above, or use the download script:

Download the data and parse it to JSON:

cd data
./download_data.sh && ./data_to_json.py

There are over 500k results, so the output JSON file will be rather large and will be heavy to render. You can limit the maximum amount of results by passing a number as an argument:

./data_to_json.py 9999

Screenshot