SpaceDB: Querying a Million Space Objects

I wanted a fast, local way to query the small-body solar system (near-Earth objects, asteroids, close approaches) without hammering NASA/JPL APIs every time. So I built SpaceDB.

What it is

SpaceDB ingests the public JPL small-body and close-approach datasets into a queryable database, backed by ~1.5M object records, with a spacekit-powered 3D viewer for orbits.

The data pipeline

The raw feeds (SBDB, NHATS, Sentry, close-approach tables) come down as JSON, get normalized, and load into the DB. From there it's ordinary queries:

GET /api/objects?neo=true&diameter_min=0.5&sort=close_approach_date

That is, "near-Earth objects bigger than 500m, soonest approach first."

Why bother

Once the data is local and indexed, exploratory questions are instant, and it pairs nicely with the AstroNN experiments. Source is on GitLab.