About
Juno Atoms follows the machines: the 6 spacecraft on this roster are the ones that left Earth orbit, the telescopes pointed away from us, and the missions that have ended but are worth remembering. Earth-observation satellites are deliberately out of scope — their readings belong somewhere else.
It keeps its own memory
Most space trackers show you the present moment. This one writes down what it sees, every hour, and keeps it forever. Every contact with the Deep Space Network, every distance measurement, every new frame from a rover gets appended to a permanent record stored in the site's own repository. The git history is the observation log.
That has one hard consequence: history can only be grown, never backfilled. The record starts the day the site starts watching, which is why every craft is on the roster from the beginning even where the write-up is still thin.
Which makes absence visible
Because the site knows what a spacecraft's normal rhythm looks like, it can notice when that rhythm breaks. "Voyager 1 hasn't been heard from in nine days, longer than usual" is a sentence that requires memory to say. A page will only make that claim once there's enough history behind it — until then it says it's still learning, which is the honest thing.
A quiet spacecraft usually means nothing alarming. The Deep Space Network is heavily oversubscribed and passes get rescheduled constantly. The claim here is narrow: this is longer than this particular spacecraft's own normal.
Where the data comes from
- DSN Now — live Deep Space Network antenna status, polled hourly. NASA/JPL-Caltech.
- JPL Horizons — ephemeris; distance and range rate, daily. NASA/JPL-Caltech.
- mars.nasa.gov raw image feeds — rover frames as they land. NASA/JPL-Caltech.
- Launch Library 2 — upcoming launches. The Space Devs.
All imagery is public NASA/JPL material and is credited to its mission. This site is not affiliated with NASA, JPL, ESA, or any space agency.
It runs on nobody's computer
Collectors run on a schedule in GitHub Actions, commit what they saw, rebuild the site, and publish it. There is no server to keep alive and no machine at home that has to stay powered on. It should still be recording long after anyone stops paying attention to it.