Solar System Simulator

The computer quickly managed to infiltrate all domains of activity, but not in a malicious way. On the contrary, it provides a powerful learning platform and is now a popular method of education, even in school. As such, Solar System Simulator comes as a practical application with which to learn more about planets and orbits.

On the bright side of things, the application saves you all the effort of going through a setup process, which is extremely handy for carrying on a thumb drive to run on multiple computer, and different classes. What's more, it leaves no traces on the target computer, and does not make any changes to system registry entries during runtime.

Most of the space represents the simulation environment itself, with a sample configuration already loaded based on system time and date settings. Alongside the simulation environment lie all necessary controls, which can even be adjusted while the simulation is running.

The application only accounts for our solar system. Centered to the Sun, all other planets are shown with representative icons, including the orbit for better understanding. You can easily toggle the visibility of planets, as well as details like names, orbits, distance from the Sun, and the coordinate system.

However, controlling the camera is a little painful, mostly because you can't interact with the preview area. You can rotate on three axis, but this is only possible through sliders. Zooming can't be done to planet level.

As far as simulation playback is concerned, there's the possibility to pass a year, month, day, hour, and minute every 0.1 seconds. You can also configure a specific starting date and time through corresponding controls.

All things considered, we can state that Solar System Simulator comes with good intentions, and is sure to provide at least minimum info and preview of orbits of this solar system planets. It could have used better camera control options, and a fullscreen mode, but it easily provides the learning basics.