Interactive explainers
Maps, simulations and reconstructions about space exploration, calculated and drawn right in the browser. Claude AI was used to make these explainer pages, so the data and texts below are not guaranteed to be correct, even though efforts have been made to avoid errors. The pages are translated from Romanian (Explicații interactive); the rest of parsec.ro is in Romanian.
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Clock · real time
Time on Mars
The time on Mars right now, calculated with NASA's Mars24 algorithm: the local time at Perseverance and Curiosity, the Mars year, and a globe and a map with the sunlit side of the planet. And how many Mars years old you are.
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Milestone · 18 November 2026
One light-day from Earth
On 18 November 2026, Voyager 1 will be one light-day from Earth, almost 26 billion kilometres away. The distance, calculated live, the Grand Tour of the two probes, the Pale Blue Dot, the Golden Record and the instruments that went dark one by one.
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Simulator · Apollo 11, 1969
Apollo Guidance Computer
The guidance computer of the Apollo spacecraft and the DSKY the crew used to talk to it, in verbs and nouns. In the simulator you key in the orbit lowering, the landing, with its 1202 alarms, and the lift-off from the Moon yourself.
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Map · 1957–2026
Launch pad atlas
The 182 pads from which at least one orbital rocket has lifted off, at 48 launch centres in 20 countries, from Sputnik 1 to September 2026. With launches per year, a rocket filter and a sheet for each centre.
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Map · October 2026
Active missions in the Solar System
The 52 spacecraft active beyond Earth orbit on 1 October 2026, from the Lagrange points to Voyager 1. With globes for the spacecraft on the Moon and Mars, a catalogue and a calendar.
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History · Apollo, 1969
VIEW
The NASA program that worked out on a UNIVAC 1108 what the Apollo astronauts saw out of the window: the stars, the Earth, the Moon and the craters below the lunar module. Four “reels” recreated in the browser.
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Simulation · glossary
Orbits
The twelve orbit types in the parsec.ro glossary (LEO, SSO, GEO, GTO, Molniya and the rest), calculated with Kepler's laws and drawn as on the screen of a cathode-ray tube.
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Reconstruction · September 2026
JUICE flies past Earth
The flyby of 28 September 2026, rebuilt in 3D from the mission's ephemerides: the night spent in Earth's shadow, the instruments pointed at Earth and the Moon, and how a probe gains 3.5 km/s without using fuel.