Jorbit Documentation

Contents

Jorbit Documentation#

Welcome to the documentation for jorbit! This package offers a framework for high-precision, JAX-based orbit determination and propagation within the solar system. It consists of several “front-end” classes and functions that are designed to spin up simulations with minimal effort, as well as a flexible “back-end” that allows for customization and extension. Much of the code is written in JAX, which allows for automatic differentiation and GPU acceleration.

Although jorbit does not rely on any other dynamics packages, its under-the-hood design is based heavily on both the IAS15 integrator in REBOUND (Rein and Spiegel 2015, Rein and Liu 2012), and on the gr_full effect in REBOUNDx (Tamayo, Rein, Shi and Hernandez, 2019). We thank these authors for making their work open-source and available to the community.

Check out the tutorials/demos for an idea of what jorbit can do, and the user guide for installation and contributing instructions. The API documentation is also available for a more detailed look at the code. Open source contributions and issues are welcome!

Attribution#

jorbit is made freely available under the GPL License. If you use this code in your research, please cite the accompanying paper:

@ARTICLE{2025PSJ.....6..252C,
       author = {{Cassese}, Ben and {Rice}, Malena and {Lu}, Tiger},
        title = "{A High-precision, Differentiable Code for Solar System Ephemerides}",
      journal = {\psj},
     keywords = {Astronomy software, Solar system, Orbit determination, Bayesian statistics, 1855, 1528, 1175, 1900, Earth and Planetary Astrophysics, Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics},
         year = 2025,
        month = nov,
       volume = {6},
       number = {11},
          eid = {252},
        pages = {252},
          doi = {10.3847/PSJ/ae0a36},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
       eprint = {2509.19549},
 primaryClass = {astro-ph.EP},
       adsurl = {https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2025PSJ.....6..252C},
      adsnote = {Provided by the SAO/NASA Astrophysics Data System}
}
Contents