juliensimon/jpl-small-body-database

JPL Small-Body Database

Part of the Orbital Mechanics Datasets collection on Hugging Face.

The complete catalog of every known small body in the Solar System — 1,523,781 asteroids and comets with full orbital elements, physical parameters, and discovery metadata from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

Dataset description

The JPL Small-Body Database (SBDB) is the authoritative source for orbital and physical data on all known asteroids, comets, and other small bodies. It is maintained by the Solar System Dynamics group at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and continuously updated as new observations refine orbit solutions and new objects are discovered.

This dataset includes orbital elements (osculating Keplerian elements at a reference epoch), physical properties (absolute magnitude, diameter, albedo, spectral type where measured), and metadata (observation arc, number of observations, orbit uncertainty). It covers numbered and unnumbered asteroids, periodic and non-periodic comets.

Schema

Column	Type	Description
spkid	int64	SPK-ID (unique JPL identifier)
full_name	string	Full designation (e.g. "1 Ceres", "433 Eros")
body_type	string	Body type code
neo	bool	Near-Earth Object flag
pha	bool	Potentially Hazardous Asteroid flag
orbit_class	string	Orbit classification (e.g. MBA, APO, AMO, ATE, COM)
eccentricity	float64	Orbital eccentricity
semi_major_axis_au	float64	Semi-major axis (AU)
inclination_deg	float64	Orbital inclination (degrees)
ascending_node_deg	float64	Longitude of ascending node (degrees)
arg_perihelion_deg	float64	Argument of perihelion (degrees)
mean_anomaly_deg	float64	Mean anomaly (degrees)
epoch_jd	float64	Epoch of osculation (Julian Date, TDB)
period_yr	float64	Orbital period (years)
mean_motion_deg_day	float64	Mean motion (degrees/day)
perihelion_time_jd	float64	Time of perihelion passage (JD, TDB)
perihelion_au	float64	Perihelion distance (AU)
aphelion_au	float64	Aphelion distance (AU)
absolute_magnitude	float64	Absolute magnitude H
diameter_km	float64	Diameter (km, null if unmeasured)
geometric_albedo	float64	Geometric albedo (null if unmeasured)
spectral_type_bus	string	Bus-DeMeo spectral taxonomy
spectral_type_tholen	string	Tholen spectral taxonomy
orbit_rms	float64	Orbit fit RMS residual
data_arc_days	int64	Observation arc length (days)
n_observations	int64	Number of observations used in orbit solution
condition_code	int64	Orbit condition code (0=well-determined to 9=poorly)
moid_au	float64	Minimum Orbit Intersection Distance with Earth (AU)
moid_jupiter_au	float64	MOID with Jupiter (AU)
first_observation	string	Date of first observation
last_observation	string	Date of most recent observation

Quick stats

• 1,523,781 small bodies (1,519,721 asteroids, 4,060 comets)
• 41,553 near-Earth objects (NEOs)
• 2,538 potentially hazardous asteroids (PHAs)
• 139,690 with measured diameters
• 138,482 with measured albedos

Usage

from datasets import load_dataset

ds = load_dataset("juliensimon/jpl-small-body-database", split="train")
df = ds.to_pandas()

# Near-Earth Objects
neos = df[df["neo"] == True]
print(f"{len(neos):,} NEOs")

# Potentially Hazardous Asteroids close to Earth
phas = df[(df["pha"] == True) & (df["moid_au"] < 0.01)]

# Main Belt asteroids by orbit class
mba = df[df["orbit_class"] == "MBA"]
print(f"{len(mba):,} Main Belt asteroids")

# Orbital element distribution
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
fig, axes = plt.subplots(1, 3, figsize=(15, 4))
axes[0].hist(df["semi_major_axis_au"].dropna().clip(0, 6), bins=200)
axes[0].set_xlabel("Semi-major axis (AU)")
axes[1].hist(df["eccentricity"].dropna(), bins=100)
axes[1].set_xlabel("Eccentricity")
axes[2].hist(df["inclination_deg"].dropna().clip(0, 60), bins=100)
axes[2].set_xlabel("Inclination (deg)")
plt.tight_layout()

Data source

NASA JPL Small-Body Database Query API. Maintained by the Solar System Dynamics group at JPL.

Update schedule

Daily at 08:00 UTC via GitHub Actions.

Related datasets

• neo-close-approaches — NEO close approach predictions
• sentry-impact-risk — Earth impact risk assessment
• fireball-bolide-events — Atmospheric impact events
• space-track-satcat — NORAD satellite catalog

Pipeline

Source code: juliensimon/space-datasets

Support

If you find this dataset useful, please give it a ❤️ on the dataset page and share feedback in the Community tab! Also consider giving a ⭐️ to the space-datasets repo.

Citation

@dataset{jpl_sbdb,
  author = {Simon, Julien},
  title = {JPL Small-Body Database},
  year = {2026},
  publisher = {Hugging Face},
  url = {https://huggingface.co/datasets/juliensimon/jpl-small-body-database},
  note = {Based on NASA/JPL Small-Body Database (SSD)}
}

License

CC-BY-4.0