I know folks on here have a love / hate relationship but I think this would benefit from moving to cloudflare's stack. Current server is completely dead (has a Hostinger IP so they probably took it down from the traffic spike)
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.
Eg I see you've got a powerful adaptive Runge-Kutta method implemented in integrator.js. While that will do really well, for the sake of study you might make the solver implementation swappable and experiment with basic techniques. Some are very slow. Some maybe unstable and blow up the solar system. Why? Numeric methods are not one size fits all - see what the different tradeoffs are and how they respond to fiddling parameters. Understand the fundamentals.
Not that there is anything wrong with just wanting to make another visualizer and learn some things along the way, it's just a hollow way to try to learn first principles.
I remember all those poorly designed but laser-printed papers with clashing typefaces and ugly clip art. But look at where we are now: the word processor didn't destroy graphic design--it made it more visible and thus more important.
AI is the same thing. This specific creation (Neo Radar) is actually very cool, but we all know there is lots of AI slop out there. That's what happens when a new, powerful tool suddenly appears. But as people learn to use AI, we will wonder how we could have lived without it. I'm never going back to pre-AI days, if I can help it.
So don't worry--things will be better in a decade or so--I mean, assuming we haven't all ascended in the Singularity or been turned into batteries by ASI.