About COSMOS

Recommended citation

For the interface, a screenshot or a figure you rendered in COSMOS, cite the project — with the update date that tells the reader which version of the pages you used:

COSMOS — interactive scientific universe explorer. https://measuredcosmos.com (content updated 2026-09-26). Rendering: COSMOS. Underlying data: Gaia DR3 (ESA/Gaia/DPAC), JPL Horizons, NASA GIBS, NASA/JPL Trek, USGS Astrogeology, MAST/STScI.

Contact COSMOS

For business enquiries, scientific corrections or privacy requests, email itsmrrishi11@gmail.com. Please include the relevant page and a description of your request. Do not send passwords, payment details or sensitive personal information.

Measured facts

What it is

A source-attributed 3D journey from Earth to galaxies and cosmic structure

Navigate to

22 core reference destinations, plus catalogue galaxies and cosmic regions

Measured stars

371,766

Planetary state

JPL Horizons archive, 2020-01-01 00:00 TDB through 2040-01-01 00:00 TDB

Cost

Core explorer free; no account required. Advertising currently inactive.

Data collected

Privacy-safe aggregate events only, with DNT and GPC respected

What COSMOS is for

Most interactive astronomy tools are either beautiful and unsourced, or rigorous and unreadable. COSMOS is an attempt at the middle: a navigable 3D space where every visible layer can be traced to a provider, a release and a licence, and where the difference between a measurement and a model is always visible.

The explorer connects Earth, tiled planetary surfaces, a separate Moon landing mode, a time-aware Solar System and 371,766 measured stars inside 100 pc. Beyond the labelled Milky Way model, you can visit the Local Group, Andromeda, nearby-galaxy catalogues and a bounded 2MRS redshift-space view. Catalogue positions, observational portraits and reconstructed interiors remain distinct.

How certainty is handled

COSMOS does not average away uncertainty. A derived distance reports the parallax it came from. An interpolated position reports its archive coverage and its held-out error. An atmospheric map reports the observation date and the feature size it can resolve. A model reports that it is a model, permanently, in the interface.

Where a dataset does not exist, the explorer shows an honest absence instead of a plausible substitute: Venus, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto and the Sun are currently rendered as labelled non-observational proxies.

What COSMOS does not do

• It does not present artwork, reconstructions or simulations as observations.
• It does not fill missing coverage with generated detail.
• It does not use "live" or "real-time" for historical mosaics or archived positions.
• It does not require an account. Advertising and affiliate tracking are inactive; privacy-safe analytics are disclosed in the Privacy notice.
• It does not claim completeness: the catalogues and archives are bounded and disclosed.

How to cite COSMOS

COSMOS is a viewer, not a primary source. Cite the underlying mission or catalogue for scientific work: Gaia DR3 (ESA/Gaia/DPAC) for the stellar catalogue, JPL Horizons for planetary state, NASA GIBS and NASA/JPL Trek for surface imagery, USGS Astrogeology for Viking and MESSENGER products, MAST/STScI for the Hubble OPAL Saturn map, and the cited literature for the Milky Way model parameters.

For the interface itself — a screenshot, a figure you rendered here, or a lesson built around the explorer — use the citation above. It carries the project name, the URL and the content update date, so a reader can tell which version of the pages you used.

Each dataset page in the ledger carries the exact attribution string a provider requires. If you reuse a COSMOS-derived figure, attribute both the underlying data and the COSMOS rendering.

• Citing a measurement? Cite the mission, instrument or catalogue named in the dataset ledger — not COSMOS.
• Citing the rendering, the interface or a screenshot? Cite COSMOS and link https://measuredcosmos.com.
• Reusing a figure? Credit the provider attribution and the COSMOS rendering separately.
• Dates matter: page content is versioned by its "content updated" date, so a citation stays reproducible.
• COSMOS is an independent project. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, sponsored by or operated by NASA, ESA, JPL, Caltech, STScI or the Gaia collaboration, and no such endorsement is implied.

Accessibility and performance note

COSMOS needs a WebGL2-capable browser. The informational pages you are reading are deliberately lightweight: they are server-rendered, they contain the scientific content in text, and they do not load the 3D application until you choose to open it.