One more asteroid map that isn’t listed in Summer’s thorough post this morning but that I still wanted to share for sheer coolness and likelihood of appearing on a dashboard screen of the Millenium Falcon, is the 3D rendering on Asterank.com.Asterank is meant to track asteroids and calculate their worth based on what might be mined from them and how difficult that material would be to extract. From the lists of ranked asteroids you can get detailed statistics, including links that take you off to NASA’s small body database. But the real treat is clicking the “View in 3D” way over on the right. Once there you can watch the traffic revolve around the sun or click a specific body and hitch a ride.
The data sources are listed on the “about” page if you want to look more closely, but since I’m not using it to pilot a space ship, the interface alone is fun enough that I’m not too hung up on the literal accuracy. The site does seem to advocate for asteroid mining, so to the extent there might be a bias, it’s probably worth making that caveat.
Actually, one other caveat is that the rendering can be a bit of a resource hog on your computer. My home computer deals with it well, but my work computer choked a little and had to pause and think a bit. So be aware of that possiblity.
