NEO Radar: A Browser-Based Engine Tracking 41,000 Real Asteroids
Neo Radar: A browser-based orbital mechanics engine with 41k real asteroids
I built NEO Radar to simulate real orbital mechanics for 41,859 Near-Earth Objects directly in your browser. Unlike simplified models, this engine uses full N-body dynamics and JPL Horizons data to calculate trajectories with mission-planner accuracy. You can toggle gravity from outer planets like Jupiter and Saturn to see how they perturb asteroid paths, revealing the true uncertainty cones that simplified two-body simulations miss.
Where simplified two-body models drift by tens of thousands of kilometers, NEO Radar stays inside the actual uncertainty cone.
- markstock
Please don't call this "full N-body dynamics" if only the outer planets are involved in the integration.
- Catloafdev
Well it seems to be hug-of-death'd - how are you loading 41k points of data?
- daviazpen
Hi HN!
I'm Davi, a 17-year-old developer from Brazil, and I've spent the last few months building NEO Radar, a browser-based orbital mechanics engine focused on Near-Earth Objects.
The goal wasn't to build another Solar System viewer, but to understand how orbital propagation actually works and implement as much of it as I could from first principles.
Some highlights:
• 41,812 real asteroids from the Minor Planet Center
• JPL Horizons ephemerides
• Newton-Raphson solver for Kepler's equation
• Adaptive RK4 N-body integration
• Monte Carlo uncertainty propagation
• Real planetary perturbations
• Interactive 2D heliocentric visualization
One architectural decision I'm particularly happy with is that the physics engine is completely isolated from rendering. The integrator has no DOM, Canvas or fetch dependencies—it simply outputs state vectors that the renderer consumes.
The repository also includes benchmarks, unit tests and documentation describing the numerical methods and the limitations of the model.
This project taught me far more about numerical methods and orbital mechanics than I expected when I started.
I'd really appreciate feedback, especially from anyone with experience in astrodynamics, numerical simulation or scientific visualization. I'm sure there are many things that can still be improved.
GitHub: