SuperEscuela Solar: a to-scale Solar System explorer for kids, on low-end phones
Solar is a free 3D Solar System explorer made for children in Latin America. You fly a ship called Solar from planet to planet, send probes to explore each world, and answer questions to unlock the next mission. Everything is at real scale: real sizes in km, and positions computed from NASA/JPL data for the current date. The default language is Spanish, and English is available.
What’s in it
- The Sun, 8 planets, the dwarf planets, all 459 moons in JPL’s catalog, 22 named asteroids, 8 comets with gas and dust tails, and the 3 known interstellar visitors on hyperbolic orbits.
- About 4,500 main-belt asteroids and 4,600 Kuiper belt objects, positioned on the GPU.
- Voyager 1 and 2, Pioneer 10 and 11 and New Horizons along their real flyby trajectories, plus JWST at L2, Parker and the ISS.
- A real sky: 9,096 stars from the Yale Bright Star Catalogue, the NASA SVS Milky Way (ESA Gaia data), and the full Messier catalog.
- Per-fragment shadows and eclipses: moon shadows on Jupiter, solar and lunar eclipses, Saturn’s shadow on its rings.
- Size comparisons up to the largest known stars.
Under the hood
- Vanilla JS and three.js only. No framework, no build step, no npm, no backend.
- Scale from meters to billions of km. The camera stays at the world origin and everything is placed relative to it in double precision before it reaches the GPU, with a logarithmic depth buffer.
- Kepler approximations, not full ephemerides, tested in Node against JPL Horizons. Planets are within 0.2°.
- Built for budget phones:
- Pixel ratio capped at 1.5.
- No shadow maps and no post-processing.
- A body gets a mesh only once it covers at least one pixel.
- Textures load on approach.
- Procedural textures are generated in slices so the animation never freezes.
- Result: about 50 fps with the CPU throttled 6×.
- Light: three.js is about 180 KB gzipped, the data about 200 KB, and the textures about 1 MB, loaded only when you get close.
- Installable PWA that works offline, with sound synthesized in Web Audio and no audio files.
It is part of SuperEscuela, a free educational platform for Spanish-speaking children. Credits: NASA/JPL, ESA Gaia, the Yale BSC and Solar System Scope textures (CC BY 4.0).
