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  • 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: https://github.com/azpeeen/NEO-Radar

    by daviazpen
  • Hey, I saw your comments have been downvoted to death for literally no apparent reason so I had to intervene.

    HN has become incredibly hostile and toxic to the very audience it created it in the first place (builders, creators, hackers)[1]. I think it's a severe case of envy, "uncs" (lmao) who didn't accomplish anything in their lives feeling left behind now that anyone with a computer can do their "magic". The hard truth is that they were always behind, but they are just realizing it now, sad.

    So, my advice to you, particularly since you're young, ignore the naysayers. Burn that into your mind, ignore the naysayers. Just do your thing, enjoy life, keep shipping cool stuff!

    Personally I think your site is great, it looks great as well, great taste w/ the choice of colors/layout etc. I was wondering about the accuracy of this, as RK4 is "good enough" but I didn't think it was this good. I saw your section at the end of the site on this, pretty impressive. Your site is solid on the theory and also the presentation, rarely you see such good execution. Congrats, man!

    1: Btw, I ran the numbers and engagement is going down. It's going the way of StackOverflow, and for the same fundamental reasons.

    by moralestapia
  • Very cool I'm going to share with our NEKAAL group at Farpoint Observatory.
    by ecommerceguy
  • If anyone is wondering or it's not clear, AI was used. (There's some discussion in a sibling comment).
    by rkagerer
  • Hey cool project! I built a solar system visualizer some years ago but just using the ephemerides data, no physics. This is ambitious. Noting your age I would say, invest some time in the basics - Euler, Improved Euler, finite differences, explicit vs implicit, multi-step methods etc.

    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.

    by woopsn
  • Why did you choose to have something else write the project if your goal was to learn as much as you can from first principles yourself?
    by zamadatix
  • Well it seems to be hug-of-death'd - how are you loading 41k points of data?
    by Catloafdev
  • you piqued my curiosity so I submitted it for indexing on deep wiki (https://deepwiki.com/azpeeen/NEO-Radar) ... surprised to see it was 1.5gb on disk... 700mb on disk of texture images and doesn't look like they've been quantized / compressed so there's some low hanging fruit there.

    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)

    by leetrout
  • Please don't call this "full N-body dynamics" if only the outer planets are involved in the integration.
    by markstock