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Hi HN! I'm Davi, a 17-year-old developer from Brazil, and I've spent the last few months building NEO Radar, a browser-based orbital mechanics engine focused on Near-Earth Objects. The goal wasn't to build another Solar System viewer, but to understand how orbital propagation actually works and implement as much of it as I could from first principles. Some highlights: • 41,812 real asteroids from the Minor Planet Cen…
Hi HN! I'm Davi, a 17-year-old developer from Brazil, and I've spent the last few months building NEO Radar, a browser-based orbital mechanics engine focused on Near-Earth Objects. The goal wasn't to build another Solar System viewer, but to understand how orbital propagation actually works and implement as much of it as I could from first principles. Some highlights: • 41,812 real asteroids from the Minor Planet Cen…
Why did you choose to have something else write the project if your goal was to learn as much as you can from first principles yourself?
My analogy: AI is like a calculator. In the hands of someone who doesn't understand math, it produces answers they can't verify. In the hands of someone learning, it lets you tackle problems that would otherwise take years to reach.
But the real answer is what I can demonstrate: I understand why Newton-Raphson converges for Kepler's equation, why RK4 needs 4 evaluations per step, why adaptive timestep matters near perihelion, and why N-body perturbations from Jupiter dominate over Saturn for most NEOs. I wrote the physics isolation boundary myself because I understood why it mattered.
Could I implement all of this from scratch without AI? Not yet. But I understand what's there and that's where I'm starting from, not ending.
Hi HN! I'm Davi, a 17-year-old developer from Brazil, and I've spent the last few months building NEO Radar, a browser-based orbital mechanics engine focused on Near-Earth Objects. The goal wasn't to build another Solar System viewer, but to understand how orbital propagation actually works and implement as much of it as I could from first principles. Some highlights: • 41,812 real asteroids from the Minor Planet Cen…
Hey cool project! I built a solar system visualizer some years ago but just using the ephemerides data, no physics. This is ambitious. Noting your age I would say, invest some time in the basics - Euler, Improved Euler, finite differences, explicit vs implicit, multi-step methods etc. Eg I see you've got a powerful adaptive Runge-Kutta method implemented in integrator.js. While that will do really well, for the sake…
Hi HN! I'm Davi, a 17-year-old developer from Brazil, and I've spent the last few months building NEO Radar, a browser-based orbital mechanics engine focused on Near-Earth Objects. The goal wasn't to build another Solar System viewer, but to understand how orbital propagation actually works and implement as much of it as I could from first principles. Some highlights: • 41,812 real asteroids from the Minor Planet Cen…
Very cool I'm going to share with our NEKAAL group at Farpoint Observatory.
Hi HN! I'm Davi, a 17-year-old developer from Brazil, and I've spent the last few months building NEO Radar, a browser-based orbital mechanics engine focused on Near-Earth Objects. The goal wasn't to build another Solar System viewer, but to understand how orbital propagation actually works and implement as much of it as I could from first principles. Some highlights: • 41,812 real asteroids from the Minor Planet Cen…
Hi HN! I'm Davi, a 17-year-old developer from Brazil, and I've spent the last few months building NEO Radar, a browser-based orbital mechanics engine focused on Near-Earth Objects. The goal wasn't to build another Solar System viewer, but to understand how orbital propagation actually works and implement as much of it as I could from first principles. Some highlights: • 41,812 real asteroids from the Minor Planet Cen…
If anyone is wondering or it's not clear, AI was used. (There's some discussion in a sibling comment).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why did you choose to have something else write the project if your goal was to learn as much as you can from first principles yourself?
When I'm starting from mostly ignorance, being an apprentice is better than trying , making little progress, and giving up. The problem will be if we never transition from being an apprentice, to independence.
Hi HN! I'm Davi, a 17-year-old developer from Brazil, and I've spent the last few months building NEO Radar, a browser-based orbital mechanics engine focused on Near-Earth Objects. The goal wasn't to build another Solar System viewer, but to understand how orbital propagation actually works and implement as much of it as I could from first principles. Some highlights: • 41,812 real asteroids from the Minor Planet Cen…
If anyone is wondering or it's not clear, AI was used. (There's some discussion in a sibling comment).
I remember all those poorly designed but laser-printed papers with clashing typefaces and ugly clip art. But look at where we are now: the word processor didn't destroy graphic design--it made it more visible and thus more important.
AI is the same thing. This specific creation (Neo Radar) is actually very cool, but we all know there is lots of AI slop out there. That's what happens when a new, powerful tool suddenly appears. But as people learn to use AI, we will wonder how we could have lived without it. I'm never going back to pre-AI days, if I can help it.
So don't worry--things will be better in a decade or so--I mean, assuming we haven't all ascended in the Singularity or been turned into batteries by ASI.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
When I'm starting from mostly ignorance, being an apprentice is better than trying , making little progress, and giving up. The problem will be if we never transition from being an apprentice, to independence.
Were people not able to accomplish that transition in the times before AI existed?