The Solar System navigator page, redesigned
The Solar System navigator shows the Sun, the eight planets, the Moon and the Tesla Roadster at their real positions for any date from 2000 to 2049. Earlier today the live globe got a new layout. The navigator page now uses the same one.
Today's numbers first
The page opens with a short header and two buttons: one jumps straight to the navigator, the other opens the live globe. Under it sit four numbers for today: how far Mars is from the Earth, how far the Roadster is, how long sunlight takes to reach us and how many times the Roadster has gone round the Sun since its launch in February 2018. They count up once when you scroll to them, and a line under them says which day and hour they were worked out for.
The buttons are grouped
Above the view the controls now sit in three labelled rows:
- Scale: readable or real.
- View: the inner planets, the whole system, or centre the view on any body.
- Show: orbits, labels, the Roadster, the spin axes and the look of the planets.
Under the view there are two more: Time, with play, the date slider, the speed, "Play the last year" and "Now", and Video, which records a short clip of the last year or of one turn around a planet. Nothing about how the navigator works has changed. The same buttons do the same things, they are just easier to find.
The rest of the page
Below the navigator you get today's full list of distances, three short panels on what the navigator shows, how the two scales differ and how the timeline works, and a panel on where the numbers come from: JPL orbits for the planets, JPL Horizons for the Roadster and Solar System Scope for the planet maps. After that come cards linking to the live globe, the browser flight game, the live map and the receiver network, the latest space posts and a list of questions people ask about the Solar System, such as how far Mars is today or whether the Roadster will come close to the Earth again.
All of that text comes from the server, in all twelve languages, so search engines and AI assistants read the same words and today's numbers that a person sees. Every link the old page had is still there.
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