About this page
A live 3D model of the Sun, the eight planets, the Moon and the International Space Station. The planets are placed where they are right now, computed from NASA/JPL orbital elements, and you can run time forward or backward from one minute per second to ten years per second.
Each planet's position is calculated for the current date from the JPL J2000 Keplerian elements (semi-major axis, eccentricity, inclination, longitude of perihelion and node, mean longitude and its rate), solved with Kepler's equation every frame. The date in the top-left corner is the simulated date; the ↻ button returns to today. Orbit spacing is compressed so the inner planets stay visible next to the outer ones, but the angles are true, so Mercury, Venus and Mars appear on the correct side of the Sun for the real sky tonight.
With "True sizes" on (the default), every body is drawn at its real scale against the Sun. The Sun is 109 times wider than Earth and 1,300 Earths would fit inside Jupiter. Turning true sizes off enlarges the planets so the small ones can be found from a distance.
Light leaves the Sun at 299,792 km/s. It reaches Mercury in about 3 min 13 s, Venus in 6 min, Earth in 8 min 19 s, Mars in 12 min 40 s, Jupiter in 43 min, Saturn in 1 h 20 min, Uranus in 2 h 40 min and Neptune in just over 4 hours. The "Light pulse from the Sun" control sends a ring outward at the real speed of light so you can watch it cross each orbit.
The ISS circles Earth every 92.9 minutes at 7.66 km/s and an altitude of about 408 km, inclined 51.6° to the equator. The model is built to the station's real layout: the 109-metre truss, eight solar array wings, the six newer roll-out arrays, the radiators, and the modules from Harmony and Columbus to Zvezda and Nauka. Select ISS and set the clock to one minute per second to watch a full orbit in 93 seconds.
The Sun is itself moving, at roughly 230 km/s around the centre of the Milky Way. Seen from outside, each planet's path through space is therefore not a closed loop but a helix, a spiral that advances with the Sun. The faint trails behind each planet draw that shape.
All NASA and USGS imagery is in the public domain. Uranus has no published colour map and is drawn procedurally. Asteroid-belt bodies are illustrative; the real belt is far emptier than any picture of it.
Schools, planetariums and science-outreach pages are welcome to embed the simulation free of charge. Paste this where you want it to appear; it is responsive and works on phones:
<iframe src="https://cosmos.pixelpocket.app/?embed=1" title="Helix Cosmos: live 3D solar system" width="100%" height="600" style="border:0;max-width:100%" loading="lazy" allow="fullscreen" allowfullscreen></iframe>
Add &tour=0 to the address to disable the automatic guided tour, or &focus=mars (any planet, iss or sun) to open on a body. A credit link back to this page is appreciated but not required.
Built by Suresh Jayaraman. Part of PixelPocket. Back to the simulation.