AXbit - an experimental visual astrodynamics lab

Oleksii Trofymchuk — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 22:07:00 +0000

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.

axneo27 / AXbit

An experimental visual astrodynamics lab for SPICE/SBDB-based solar-system exploration.

AXbit

AXbit is an experimental visual astrodynamics lab for SPICE/SBDB-based solar-system exploration, small-body trajectories, and close-approach visualization. It is designed for visualization, exploration, and validation-assisted experimentation.

Features • Screenshots • Quick Start • Documentation • Contribute

Important

Project Status: This project is an early-stage research and visualization tool. It is useful for exploration and validation-assisted experimentation, but it should not be treated as an operational navigation, hazard assessment, or mission-design system. The visuals are also currently basic — bodies are rendered as shaded spheres — the priority so far has been the underlying physics and data pipeline, not visual fidelity.

Key Features

Small-body trajectory propagation and close-approach analysis.
SPICE-based ephemerides for precise solar-system geometry.
Interactive 3D visualization of trajectory geometry and scenarios.
Built with Rust and wgpu for shader-based 3D rendering.

Screenshots

Quick Start

AXbit is a visual application. Before running it, you need the CSPICE toolkit in place:

Download…

View on GitHub