About

The Virtual Solar Swarm starts from a question with the hard part removed. Assume getting there is solved by someone else, and that a sensor package can arrive anywhere in the solar system. What would you send to each of the two hundred or so moons and planets we know by name, and why? Then what lies beyond them? Here that question becomes working models you can pull on. It is a thing to think with, not a mission plan.

This is an evolving choose-your-own science adventure, made to help open up the solar system for the civic space stewards of Earth and the solar system.

Data and models

Nothing described on this site has been built or launched. The orbital elements, sizes, masses, spin rates, tilts and magnetic axes of all 384 catalogued bodies are real published values; the physics is real but simplified; the satellites, buses, instruments and timelines are design fiction grounded in current public technology, and the cost figures are engineering estimates for comparison, not a budget anyone has raised.

The orbits come from NASA/JPL. The eight planets use JPL's Keplerian element set with its secular rates; the 187 asteroids, comets, centaurs, dwarf planets and trans-Neptunian objects come from the JPL Small-Body Database, each at its own solution epoch; the moons carry ecliptic mean elements fitted to JPL Horizons. Checked against JPL Horizons on 26 August 2026, the heliocentric positions this site computes sit a median of one arcsecond from where Horizons puts them, and no body is further off than 0.02 degrees; moon positions sit a median of 0.7 degrees out. Radii and masses were reconciled against JPL body by body, keeping whichever reference is the newer one. The full source and accuracy note is in the repository.

Approximations

Two-body maths. Each orbit is computed as if only the Sun (or the parent planet) pulls on it. Real missions model every tug at once. Elements are taken near the present epoch to keep the interval over which that matters short, so accuracy falls away the further a date sits from today. Comets get no allowance for outgassing, which is why Encke drifts fastest of all.
Coplanar circular transfers. Launch windows and fuel costs use the classic Hohmann transfer between circular orbits in one flat plane. Real windows shift with eccentricity, inclination and gravity assists, which usually help.
Mean-longitude window timing. Departure dates come from average orbital motion, so treat them as month-accurate at best, and rougher for very stretched orbits.
Stability rules of thumb. "A third of the Hill sphere prograde, half retrograde" is a widely used shorthand, not a guarantee; real stability maps are lumpy.
Clockwork orbits. Stationary and sun-synchronous orbits are computed from published spin rates and oblateness (J2) where those have been measured; where they have not, the lab says "unmeasured" rather than guessing. Regular moons are treated as tidally locked; Hyperion is modelled as the tumbler it is.
Moons are placed, most of them. 155 of the 187 catalogued moons carry ecliptic mean elements fitted to JPL Horizons, so a planet's page shows its moons where they actually are, to a median of 0.7 degrees today and 1.0 degrees two years out. The other 32 carry the size and shape of their orbit but no position, and are named as such: Janus and Epimetheus swap orbits, Helene and Polydeuces swing about their Lagrange points, and the satellites of dwarf planets and asteroids have no published element table.
Estimated masses. Many small bodies have never been weighed. Where the catalogue marks a mass as estimated, gravity comes from size and a typical density for that class of object.
Design lives and costs. Satellite lifetimes per environment and mass-production prices are round-number engineering guesses, made adjustable wherever they matter. Prices are shown in Australian dollars converted at 1 USD to A$1.55, an indicative August 2026 rate, with the USD figure alongside.
Interstellar visitors. The three visitors are shown at their catalogued paths but cannot be orbited; they are in the catalogue as intercept targets.
Fast transfers. The push dial on the windows page models a single tangential burn at Earth's orbit, riding the resulting ellipse or hyperbola. Real fast missions add gravity assists and mid-course burns, which usually do better.
The gravity lab. The Lagrange landscape is the planar circular restricted three-body problem: both bodies on circular orbits, everything flattened to their plane. The classic teaching model; right for seeing why the orbits exist, not for flying them.
Engines. Specific impulse and cost figures for the cruise engines are round representative numbers; the Neumann Drive's mileage is its laboratory promise, marked as such wherever it appears. No thorium reactor has flown, so none is listed as available.
The census. Beyond the bodies holding dedicated stations, the catalogue carries survey entries: the named moons of the giant planets and a deeper sweep of small worlds, with no dedicated satellites. It aims at every moon with a name; the unnamed provisional specks, and any names the sweep missed, wait for the next pass. Planet Nine is listed as a hypothesis, not a discovery.
Convoys and the network. Convoy loads, renewal-per-window figures, light lags and trunk capacities come from the same transfer and position models as the rest of the site. Destinations are planetary systems plus distance bands, so bodies are batched by where they actually are rather than by what taxonomy calls them; real mission design would split and merge convoys far more cleverly than one median distance per band allows.
The live feed. Every page runs offline from files in the repository, with one exception: the Sun's dossier pulls current frames from NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory, and falls back to the stored map when that feed is unreachable.
The imagery. Every globe on this site wears humanity's real map of that body where one exists and is carried here: thirty-two of them, from the Sun and the eight planets to the Galilean moons, the Saturnian and Uranian families, Triton, Pluto, Charon, Ceres, Vesta and Phobos. Bodies without a published surface map are drawn as a lit sphere with a latitude and longitude grid, which shows size and orientation only.
The numbers are dials. No rule sets how many satellites there are, how many go to any one body, or which bodies get them first. The dial on the home page sets the total and is remembered on your device, so the catalogue, fleet, convoy and cadence pages all read your setting. The scale page adds the allocation policy: observatory size, station strengths, interceptors held ready, fill order. Station sizes ride the total in proportion unless you switch that off, and every figure downstream is recomputed rather than looked up.
What is assumed rather than measured. The tier scheme is an assumption: the names, the interceptor and survey tiers, which body sits in which tier, and the rule that station sizes scale with the fleet. The station sizes are anchored to published ranges from the concept this grew out of (four for a baseline picket, ten to twenty for the enhanced ones, thirty to fifty for priority worlds, fifty to a hundred for the Sun), but the choice within each range, and which bodies were picked to hold dedicated stations, are not derived from anything. Treat them as an opening position, which is what the dials are for.

The concepts this leans on

The study assumes only technologies with flying ancestors: multi-satellite formation flying (NASA's MMS and the Starling swarm), swarm self-navigation by camera (Stanford's StarFOX experiment), deep-space laser communication (NASA's DSOC), quantum key distribution from orbit (the Micius satellite), solar observation from multiple vantage points (Solar Orbiter and the HelioSwarm concept), and satellite mass production as proven by Starlink. What has no ancestor yet is the scale, and scale is exactly what these models are for.

Imagery credits

The maps bundled with this site, each shown on its body's dossier and in the orbit lab:

Assemblies marked CC BY 4.0 are by Solar System Scope, built from NASA mission and elevation data, used under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence. NASA and USGS imagery is public domain. This site's own code and text are under its own licence, below.

Finding your way around

The site map lists every page grouped by what it is for, and Origins records where the question came from. The whole thing is a public repository: corrections to real measured data, and better authoritative maps, can be proposed through its issues. Where the surface maps came from, and where to find the ones still missing, is recorded in MAP-SOURCES.md.

Spacecraft images

The Watching the Sun page carries 44 spacecraft images from Wikimedia Commons, each under public domain or a Creative Commons licence that allows reuse (Public domain: 37, CC BY-SA 4.0: 2, CC BY-SA 3.0 igo: 2, CC0: 1, CC BY 4.0: 1, CC BY-SA 3.0: 1). Every card links to its mission page; the file behind each image is named in assets/watchers/_credits.json with its licence and creator.

The music

The songs on this site are by i C. infinity, from the album A Protopian Gambit: "Heliospheric Lantern" on the Sun's dossier, and both voices of "We Go Beyond" here and on the home page. The album is on Suno, and the wider music universe holds the rest.

Signature

🤝🔷 A Luke × Claude build. Created by Luke Nathan Hayes (auraofintelligence) and Claude (Fable 5), August 2026. Not a Codex build. Part of the wider Aura of Intelligence and Strange But True family of public design studies.

Licence

Released under the Strange But True Public Source Licence: free to read, learn from and adapt for personal, educational, artistic, research and community use with attribution; all commercial and corporate rights reserved to Luke Nathan Hayes. The full text is in LICENCE.md.