The Solar System, Live in 3D

WatchSat’s Solar System view is a heliocentric map of the whole system in one frame: the Sun at the centre, the eight planets and Pluto on their real orbits, every world labelled, and the spacecraft WatchSat tracks drawn at their real positions with the paths they have flown. Distances are true to scale — the bodies themselves are enlarged, because at this range every one of them is far smaller than a pixel.

Where the positions come from

Planet positions and the sampled orbit paths are computed in your browser from the astronomy-engine ephemeris — each orbit is one full sidereal period of real ephemeris samples, not a drawn circle or a fitted ellipse. Spacecraft positions come from NASA/JPL Horizons state vectors, refreshed by WatchSat’s scheduled deep-space data job and extrapolated live between refreshes.

What you can do here

Click any world to fly to it, run time forward or back at several rates, or return to the live wall clock. The interstellar craft — Voyager 1 and 2, the Pioneers, New Horizons — are far outside this frame, so their trajectories run off the edge; follow them on Deep Space. To track satellites in Earth orbit instead, open the live globe.

One frame, two clocks

Planet positions and spacecraft positions are computed by completely different machinery and still land in the same frame. Astronomy Engine evaluates a planetary ephemeris for the displayed instant; each spacecraft carries heliocentric state vectors sampled from JPL Horizons in the J2000 equatorial (ICRF) frame — exactly the frame the ephemeris returns — so the two can be differenced directly. Craft on nearly straight coasts are extrapolated linearly from their state vector; the ones whose paths curve too much for that (a solar-orbit cruise, for instance) carry a dense table of sampled states and are interpolated between them. The snapshot is refreshed weekly by a scheduled job, so what you see is a live extrapolation of real mission data rather than an animation on a loop.

What the imagery is — and is not

Every world is drawn with real mission imagery wherever a global map exists: NASA’s Blue Marble for Earth, LRO/LROC for the Moon, Viking for Mars, Magellan radar for Venus, Cassini for Jupiter, MESSENGER-heritage data for Mercury, New Horizons for Pluto, and SDO’s latest frames for the Sun. Two planets are honest exceptions: no global optical map of Uranus or Neptune exists — Voyager 2’s flybys are the only close imaging ever returned — so both are rendered from a single albedo colour through the same photometric shader, with no invented banding or spots. Saturn’s rings are lit and shadowed by real geometry, but their opacity is a proxy derived from a colour strip that carries no transparency data. Full provenance, including which sources are official agency products, is on the credits page.

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