A NASA spreadsheet, turned into somewhere you can fly
Exoplanet Universe
An interactive 3D map of 6,150 confirmed exoplanets, built from the CSV NASA publishes and covering thirty years of discovery from 51 Pegasi b in 1995 to the TESS era. Live, public, and free to fly around.
Where it started
NASA has the best data. The interaction design was the problem.
I spend time in NASA's Eyes on Exoplanets, the reference tool, built on the most accurate catalogue that exists. Every planet is a star-shaped sprite; zoom in and you get an ellipse and a label. It is completely accurate and I have never felt much looking at it. None of that is a data problem. It is a visualisation and interaction design problem, which is what this project is.
The archive gives a row per planet, and right ascension, declination and distance are already a point in space. Distance is the interesting part: the nearest planet is four light-years out and the furthest nearly thirty thousand, so plot it honestly and everything except the far edge collapses into a dot. Distance is compressed logarithmically, and the app tells you where you are in light-years the whole time you are moving, so the compression is never hidden.
The product calls
What to render, and what the surfaces should look like.
The obvious build gives every planet a sphere, a texture and a label, and a page that takes half a minute to load and runs at nine frames a second. So they are not all the same kind of object: a hundred and thirty-seven get real meshes and information panels, the other six thousand are one point cloud drawn in a single pass, and clicking any of them promotes it on the spot.
No telescope can resolve an exoplanet, so there are no textures to find and stock planet art would be a lie. The surface is generated from what NASA does know: temperature picks the world, above 1,600 kelvin lava, above 350 a Venus-like haze, below 140 frozen nitrogen, and the planet's own identifier seeds the tint.
The camera was the hardest part. A fixed zoom step is unusable across this range, so every notch moves you a percentage of the distance you have left and you approach a surface without quite reaching it. Click any planet and it flies there itself and arrives framed.
Evals
How do you check that a hundred and thirty-seven planets look right?
A 3D visualisation can pass every unit test and still put a planet in the wrong place, in the wrong colour, or with a confidently wrong number under it.
- 137 flights
The visual audit
A Playwright script opens the real app, flies to every featured planet, reads the dominant colour off the render and checks it against that planet's scientific class. Zero mismatches, zero neighbouring pairs that looked alike.
- 137 rows
The accuracy audit
Every featured planet checked back against its NASA row: discovery year, detection method, radius, temperature, and whether each number was measured or worked out.
- 85 checks
The automated suite
Coordinate transforms, camera bounds, filters, search ranking, timeline gating. The things that are simply either right or wrong.
- 15 checks
The manual pass
What no script can see. Whether the opening is beautiful, and whether somebody landing cold knows what they are looking at.
The build ran as a Driver and a Navigator: one agent writes and is not allowed to decide what to build, the other reviews and never writes. An agent reviewing its own output agrees with itself every time. Writing the spec is the part that stayed mine, because the Navigator can only review against something, and that is a limit on me before it is one on them.
About
Most of the seven years was spent alongside the CEO, the head of design, engineering, business analysts, subject matter experts and growth.
What I want next is AI-native product work, and a place where I can keep building great products myself.
Education
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MS, Cognitive Science
Indian Institute of Technology Gandhinagar2015 to 2017
Thesis on the cognitive system of musical improvisation, read through phenomenology.
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BS, Life Science and Biochemistry
St. Xavier's College, Mumbai2012 to 2015
- sunat.archit6@gmail.com
- +91 99136 42634