Terms of use

1. What Astral Archive is

Astral Archive is an independent reference collection covering mission records, constellations, deep-sky catalogues and preprint literature. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by or operated by NASA, CNSA, ESA, JAXA, ISRO or any other agency, observatory or operator. Agency and mission names appear only to identify the source of a record.

2. Sources and attribution

Records are compiled from public archives, release notes and catalogue files, then normalised into this site's own structure. The orbital element snapshot behind the tracker is likewise captured from public sources at build time. The full list of upstream sources, together with the licences of the bundled software runtimes, is on the notice page.

Each upstream source keeps its own terms. Where those terms are more restrictive than these, the upstream terms win for that data.

3. Accuracy, and its limits

Mission records are transcribed by hand and cross-checked, but transcription errors are possible; corrections are welcome and are applied when reported.

Orbital positions are not live tracking data. They are propagated in your browser from a dated two-line element set that is captured when the site is built, and that set ages. The tracker shows the epoch of each element set, its age in hours, and an estimated position uncertainty, so the quality of any given position is visible rather than implied. Error grows with age, especially in low Earth orbit.

Accordingly, nothing here may be used for navigation, collision avoidance, pointing a telescope at a moving object, antenna scheduling, or any other operational decision. It is a reference and study tool.

The day and night shading on the tracker's map is an approximation, and constellation region boundaries are computed from catalogue centres rather than from the IAU's published boundary definition files.

4. Permitted use

You may read, cite and link to the archive freely. You may reuse the compiled structure and the normalised fields this project adds, provided you credit Astral Archive and do not present the material as an official product of any agency. You may not resell the archive as a whole, or present it as your own work.

5. Membership and payment

Reading the archive needs no account and no payment. The member tier is an optional recurring subscription that raises the rendering tier, opens every survey band and removes the free allowances each page states. Nothing that is free today becomes paid.

The subscription is sold by a merchant of record, on that merchant's own checkout page. This site never sees or stores your payment details: what a purchase produces is a licence key. The merchant's terms and refund policy govern the sale, and the receipt they send you is the record of it.

Activating the key on a device checks it against the merchant once and stores the answer in that browser, in the record described in the privacy notice. Membership applies to the device it was activated on and can be given up from the same dialog, which leaves the key usable on your other machines.

Because that record lives in your browser, a determined person can edit it there. That is a property of a site with no server behind it rather than an oversight, and it is stated here so that nobody subscribes expecting a lock this build cannot provide.

6. No warranty

The archive is provided as is, without warranty of any kind, express or implied, including fitness for a particular purpose. To the fullest extent permitted by law, Astral Archive is not liable for any loss or damage arising from use of the site or its data.

7. Changes

These terms may be revised as the site gains features. The date at the top of this page records the last revision. Features not yet present — accounts, syncing between devices, saved workspaces — are not covered here and will be described before they are introduced.

8. Contact

Corrections, licence questions, billing questions or reuse requests: hello@astral-archive.app.