ExoExplorer
iPhone & iPad · NASA Exoplanet Archive
ExoExplorer draws the 4,700-plus planetary systems in NASA’s Exoplanet Archive in 3D, from the archive’s own measurements, and marks in amber every value it had to work out for itself.
Coming soon to the App StoreEvery system opens with its star at the centre and its planets moving on their measured orbits. Find one by name in the list, or browse outward from home, nearest first.
Planetary systems span five orders of magnitude: TRAPPIST-1’s seven planets all orbit within 0.07 AU of their star, while HR 8799’s outermost is 68 AU out. Log spreads any system out so every orbit can be read. True shows real proportions, with planets shrunk to specks. Linear lays the planets out in a row, with their numbers in a table beside them.
Find itLog · True · Linear, below the scene
Conservative and optimistic habitable zones are computed for every star from its temperature and luminosity, following Kopparapu et al. (2014). Where a star lies outside the range that model was built for, its zone is labelled as an extrapolation.
Find itHabitable zone, below the scene
Radius, mass, length of year, temperature, how much starlight it receives, and how and when it was found. Every mass says what kind it is: a measurement, an estimate from the planet’s size, or only a lower limit.
Find itTap a star or planet
About 7% of planets have no published orbital distance. ExoExplorer works it out from the orbital period and the star’s mass with Kepler’s third law, and marks it Orbit derived. A spectral class inferred from a star’s temperature is marked the same way.
Find itSettings › Data › Highlight derived values
Stand in any system and see the catalogued systems around it in the directions they would appear from there, with our Sun among them.
Find itSettings › Display › Night-sky neighbourhood
On devices with Apple Intelligence, summaries are written on your iPhone or iPad from the archive’s values alone, then checked against those values before you see them. Well-known systems have hand-written entries, and every summary says how it was written.
Find itSettings › Summaries
A complete copy of the archive comes with the app, so it opens straight into the data with or without a connection. When you’re online, it downloads the latest version at most once a day.
Find itSettings › Archive snapshot
No account, no ads, no analytics and no crash reporting. The only server ExoExplorer contacts is the NASA Exoplanet Archive, to download planet data. Summaries are written on your device and stay there.
POST https://exoplanetarchive.ipac.caltech.edu/TAP/sync
query=select pl_name, hostname, … from pscomppars
&format=csvExoExplorer uses data from the NASA Exoplanet Archive, which is operated by the California Institute of Technology, under contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration under the Exoplanet Exploration Program.