solar-rs

A terminal-based solar system tracker and visualizer written in Rust.

solar-rs fetches real-time heliocentric ephemeris data (positions of planets in Astronomical Units (AU)) using the NASA JPL Horizons API and renders an interactive 2D map of the solar system directly in your terminal using ratatui.

Features

• Real-Time Data: Fetches precise heliocentric positions (X, Y, Z, and radial distance) of the Sun and eight planets.
• Terminal Visualization: Displays a table of the current coordinates and an interactive 2D orbital map.
• Interactive Controls:
  • Zoom in/out of the map.
  • Change focus levels to fit different planets’ orbits within the view.
• Unicode Support: Optional flag to use rich Unicode icons for planetary bodies.

Prerequisites

• Standard Rust toolchain (Cargo and Rustc). Install Rust

Installation & Running

Clone the repository and run it using Cargo:

cargo run --release

To run with enhanced Unicode icons (recommended if your terminal supports them and you have a compatible font like Nerd Fonts installed):

cargo run --release -- --unicode

Controls

While the application is running, you can interact with the map using the following keys:

• + / = : Zoom in.
• - : Zoom out.
• 0 : Reset zoom and focus to the default view (Neptune).
• [ : Focus in (fit to smaller max orbit, e.g., inner planets).
• ] : Focus out (fit to larger max orbit).
• q : Quit the application.

How It Works

The app runs a background asynchronous task using tokio to fetch planetary vector data from the NASA JPL Horizons API for the current minute. The main thread listens to terminal input using crossterm and updates the ratatui UI at regular intervals.

Dependencies

• ratatui & crossterm: Terminal UI layout and rendering.
• reqwest & tokio: Asynchronous HTTP pulling of the Horizons API.
• serde & serde_json: Parsing JSON responses.
• chrono: Time manipulation to request accurate current ephemeris.

License

This project is licensed under the MIT or Apache 2.0 License.