☄️ NASA JPL Small-Body Database Scraper

🚀 Pull asteroid and comet science data in seconds. Get full names, SPK-IDs, diameters, albedos, rotation periods, spectral types and a complete set of orbital elements straight from NASA/JPL.

The NASA/JPL Small-Body Database (SBDB) is the reference catalogue for asteroids and comets in the Solar System, maintained by the Solar System Dynamics group at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. This Actor reads the official keyless SBDB API and returns clean, structured records combining physical parameters (magnitude, diameter, albedo, rotation period, spectral type) with full orbital elements (semi-major axis, eccentricity, inclination, node, argument of perihelion, mean anomaly, period) plus MOID and orbit class.

You can either look up a specific list of objects by number, name or SPK-ID, or browse the catalogue by kind to list many bodies at once. Every record links back to its source on the SBDB API.

🎯 Target Audience	💡 Primary Use Cases
Astronomers and astrophysics researchers	Building asteroid and comet datasets for analysis
Aerospace and mission planning teams	Selecting targets by orbit class, MOID or diameter
Educators and planetarium developers	Teaching orbital mechanics with real numbers
Data scientists and hobbyists	Feeding orbital and physical data into models

📋 What the NASA JPL Small-Body Database Scraper does

This Actor turns the SBDB API into a tidy table of asteroid and comet records. For each object it collects identification (full name, short name, designation, SPK-ID, kind, orbit class, NEO and PHA flags), physical parameters (absolute magnitude H, slope G, diameter, albedo, rotation period, spectral type) and orbital elements (a, e, i, node, argument of perihelion, mean anomaly, perihelion and aphelion distance, orbital period), together with Earth and Jupiter MOID and observation arc dates.

Two modes are available. Provide a list of designations to fetch specific bodies one by one with the richest physical data, or leave the list empty and browse the catalogue by kind to list many asteroids or comets quickly.

📊 Data fields

Each record includes: absoluteMagnitude, albedo, diameterKm, eccentricity, fullName, inclinationDeg, moidAu, orbitClass, results, rotationPeriodHours, scrapedAt, semiMajorAxisAu, sourceUrl, spectralType, spkId. These field names come straight from the actor's dataset schema, so what you see here is what lands in your dataset.

🚀 How to use

1. Sign up for a free Apify account using this link.
2. Open the NASA JPL Small-Body Database Scraper.
3. Enter a list of designations, or leave it empty and pick a browse kind.
4. Set how many records you want and start the run.
5. Collect your structured asteroid and comet records when the run finishes.

🔗 Recommended Actors

• Solar System Bodies Scraper
• NASA Exoplanet Archive Scraper
• NOAA SWPC Space Weather Scraper
• OpenChargeMap Scraper

💡 Pro Tip: browse the complete ParseForge collection.

⚠️ Disclaimer: independent tool, not affiliated with NASA or JPL. Only publicly available data collected.

🆘 Need Help?

If you hit a bug, have questions about setup, or need a scraper we haven't built yet, open our contact form or write to parseforge@protonmail.com. We also take on paid custom data projects.

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