Exoplanet Explorer: Every Known Exoplanet as a 3D World, on Android

Exoplanet Explorer puts more than 6,000 confirmed exoplanets in your pocket, and the count grows as new discoveries are confirmed. Each one comes from NASA's Exoplanet Archive and is rebuilt as a 3D world from its measured mass, size, orbit and star, not drawn by an artist. It's free, with no ads and no account.

Every known exoplanet plotted on a map of the Milky Way

Spin a planet in your hand, then step back to see its whole star system to scale: its sibling worlds, its star, and the moons it could hold. Or stand on its surface, under its sun, and look around. With a phone headset you can do it in VR.

Realistic 3D renderings of exoplanets

Every planet comes with the story behind it: how it was found and when, how far it is from Earth, how long it would take to get there, and how it scores as a place for life. You can browse by kind of world, host star or crowded systems, or compare two planets side by side.

Standing on the surface of an exoplanet, under its sun

How it's built

Exoplanet Explorer isn't a separate codebase. It's a second app built from TerraForge (opens in a new tab)'s repository: the same Next.js and Three.js code, exported as a static bundle and packaged for Android with Capacitor. A build target decides which routes go into which app, and it's unit-tested, so a page added to TerraForge later stays out of the Explorer unless it's meant to be there.

The Explorer is deliberately smaller than TerraForge. It has no accounts, no database, no sign-in and no AI, and a test forbids its code from importing any of them. The full catalogue ships inside the app, so it works offline from the first launch. When it's online it checks for newly confirmed planets and validates the update before replacing anything, so a bad download can never leave it with less than it shipped with.

A visual breakdown of an exoplanet's star system