AXbit - an experimental visual astrodynamics lab

announcements
1

demo

AXbit is an experimental visual astrodynamics lab for SPICE/SBDB-based solar-system exploration, small-body trajectories, and close-approach visualization. Built with Rust and wgpu. And other stuff.

Key Features

  • Small-body trajectory propagation and close-approach analysis.
  • SPICE-based ephemerides for precise solar-system geometry. I wrote my own CSPICE bindings for this — not for lack of existing wrappers, but to understand that layer myself (I could've linked the whole library directly, but wanted a comfortable intermediate abstraction).
  • Interactive 3D visualization of trajectory geometry.

Should not be treated as a mission-design system or similar. It started just as a hobby project (wanted to learn wgpu), tested on MacOS Silicon for now only. The visuals are also currently basic, but the priority is mostly physics for now.

Contributions and feedback are welcome! A lot of room for improvement.

P.S. No real formal background in astrodynamics or graphics — I'm learning both currently. Corrections and pointers are very welcome.

2

Small update: AXbit v0.1.0 is now available (for macOS Silicon).

This is the first packaged release for macOS on Apple Silicon. It includes all default functionality, updated documentation, and automated release tooling. Also added more features to kernel managament.

I’m looking for contributors. And potentially future co-maintainers - especially around astrodynamics validation, numerical methods, wgpu, creating useful analytics and research tools.

Feedback and testing are welcome:

P.S. Looks like should work normally, now without "it works on my machine" type stuff :slight_smile: