In partnership with
Cosmic Footprint Society
Beyond the Earth Foundation
Project management and author: Adrien Normier. The aggregated databases belong to their owners and are reused under their own terms (GCAT CC BY 4.0, NASA/JPL public domain, ESA Gaia credit policy, and others) — full citations and terms per source on the documentation page. Estimated values are always labeled as such.
Licence: SSR-GPL v2.0 — public-interest use (education, research, non-profit, non-commercial outreach and art, citation) is free; any other use requires written authorization. The system is licensed to the Cosmic Footprint Society under a perpetual public-interest grant (documents archived by the Cosmic Footprint Society). Attribution form: “SolarSystemRegistry.org — Adrien Normier”.
The curated registry as a table — search every object, with optional light factory augmentation (estimated values in gold), and jump from any row into the simulation.
The live 4D scene: navigate from ground sites to the local group, scrub time from 1940 to 2060, watch transmissions expand at the speed of light.
What to look for? Every phenomenon the simulation renders, explained — live windows at three parameter scales, rendered by the simulation engine itself.
The same scene in your headset (WebXR) — or Phone VR on iOS: stargazing mode and the Ground-Lock Prototype.
The first comprehensive, cross-domain visualisation of humanity's actions and long-term standing in space — including beyond LOE — recorded without judgment, archived in the open, embedded in a cutting-edge cross-platform system, and open to every non-profit actor from school kids to policy actors, making space contextual awareness available to all.
This registry answers the call to address humanity's cosmic footprint, co-signed by more than 150 endorsers from 33 countries — scientists, engineers, ethicists and citizens asking for the empirical characterization of our presence beyond Earth (Nature Astronomy, 2025 — consider co-endorsing).
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None of this would exist without the earlier, extraordinarily valuable work of the people and collaborations who built the underlying datasets — and chose to release them openly, for the benefit of all. Among them, individuals of exceptional engagement maintaining world-reference catalogs on their own time: Jonathan McDowell (General Catalog of Artificial Space Objects) and Paul E. Quast (A Profile of Humanity, Beyond the Earth Foundation).
ESA / Gaia / DPAC · NASA/JPL Horizons and the missions' navigation teams · JPL Solar System Dynamics (E. M. Standish) · NASA Exoplanet Archive (IPAC/Caltech) · IAU Working Group on Star Names · ESA Hipparcos · Planck Collaboration · de Vaucouleurs et al. (RC3) · ATNF pulsar catalogue · SIPRI/FOA and OGSO/CMR (Yang, North & Romney, LDEO) · A. Zaitsev (METI records) · UNOOSA Online Index · NASA History Program Office · NASA 3D Resources · NASA/JPL-Caltech (R. Hurt) · Solar System Scope — each reused under its own licence, cited per record on the documentation page.
Through these cascading open licences, the number of people whose work flows into this registry is conservatively over 10,000, across seven decades: the Gaia collaboration alone spans 400+ institutions and ~1,200 active members; the Exoplanet Archive aggregates the discovery papers of 6,000+ planets; Planck counted hundreds of scientists; add the navigation teams of 24 deep-space probes and the trackers and catalog compilers working since 1957. An order of magnitude, labeled as such — like every estimate here.
The footprint itself. Not who's where or how to avoid collisions — humanity's whole long-term mark on space, taken as one object of study.
Every domain, every region. Physical, chemical, biological, dynamical, electromagnetic — from Earth orbit to the deep solar system, not one zone.
Recorded, not judged. Effects are registered without presuming benefit or harm — the neutral empirical layer beneath any policy.
The gaps are part of the record. The registry marks what is unrecorded or unknown — absent EM baselines, missing measurements — not only what exists.
A durable, open archive. A persistent public record of the footprint, including applied mitigation measures that nothing else keeps.
Made to be read. Scales and physics are a barrier; transparency needs legibility — summaries, visualization, plain language. Built to be understood from the ground.
Open and stable. Public access, permanent identifiers, downloadable — no consent wall, no moving target.
Fully documented. Metadata, provenance, calibration basis and stated uncertainty on every record.
Standards-based. Assembled from published catalogs under recognized standards, in one interoperable format.
Validated and labeled. Quality-checked; estimated and synthetic values always flagged as such.
Usable tools. Search, table, and the 4D scene — instruments for experts and non-experts alike.
Clear terms. Explicit licence for each source and for the registry as a whole.
Some catalogued objects lack the few parameters a visualization physically requires — an orbital element, a size, a metallicity. The factory fits the minimal set of statistically probable values needed to render the record at all. Every fitted value is anchored on a published model, listed per object with its method, and shown in gold wherever you read it.
Where a region is empty or statistically unrealistic, the factory generates synthetic populations that follow published science — for example, a galactic field of stars sampled from an observed density structure. Filled content is tagged SYNTHETIC, rendered dim and translucent, and never mixed with measured records.
In both modes the factory is the only place an estimated or synthetic value may originate: stateless, deterministic under a seed, anchored on the published models referenced in the library — so any estimate can be audited, reproduced, or discarded. The full inventory of its functions is on the factory page.
Contributions are welcome — a different visualisation on the same registry, new data, or another use of the modules. To join: contact@cosmicfootprintsociety.org.
Cosmic Footprint Society
Beyond the Earth Foundation