About
About Space Radar
Space Radar is a free 3D map of space in a web browser: the satellites and the space station, launches, probes, the planets, the nearest stars and the galaxies, each drawn where it really is, with where the numbers come from.
What it is
It draws 29 layers and reads 31 feeds from 14 public sources to do it, and offers 28 guided trips that fly the camera from stop to stop. Every position is worked out in the visitor's own browser from public data, for the instant on the clock: satellites from their orbital elements, planets and probes from ephemerides. The clock can be moved, and the sky moves with it.
Why it exists
Space is easy to see and hard to understand in the wrong picture. Most pictures of the Solar System are not to scale, most satellite maps are 2D, and almost none say what is measured and what is imagined. This one is built to be honest about that first, and beautiful second.
Who makes it
It is an open-source project, Sara-Managed-Projects/space-radar on GitHub, written in the open under the MIT License. Anyone can read the code, run a copy, report a wrong number or suggest an idea there, and the people who have contributed are named in the repository's history. There is no company behind a paywall and no person's name on the page: the project is the code and its sources.
Free, and staying usable
Space Radar has no account, no advertising and no tracker, and charges nothing. No promise about a website can be a promise about forever, so this is the one that can be kept: the code is open, and a copy runs on any computer with no internet at all, from a zip file (see the page for teachers). If this site ever went away, the map would not.
The name
"Radar" here means a sweep of what is up there, not a radio echo: nothing on this site is detected by us. Every position is computed from catalogues that others publish, and every card says which and how old. Space Radar is not part of, and not endorsed by, NASA, ESA, CelesTrak or any space agency or company, and other products use similar words.