2026-01-20 · Getting started · 7 min
Asteroids vs planetary features: what you’re actually searching
Two different ‘name spaces’: surface features (craters, mountains) vs minor planets (asteroids). Here’s how to read results.
In this project you can search in two official “name spaces”:
- Planetary features (surface names): craters, mountains, valleys…
- Minor planets (asteroids and some comets): numbered objects with orbital data
They look similar in the UI (“a name”), but they come from different catalogs and mean different things.
Planetary features: names on a surface
Think of these like place names on a map — but the map is the Moon, Mars, Venus…
Typical fields:
- Feature type (crater, mons, vallis…)
- Body (Mars, Moon…)
- Coordinates (lat/lon)
- Name origin
Asteroids: objects that orbit the Sun
Minor planets have orbital parameters. Our UI highlights the most important ones:
- a (semi-major axis): orbit size (AU)
- e (eccentricity): orbit shape (0=circle)
- i (inclination): tilt (degrees)
- NEO / PHA flags when available
We also convert AU to kilometers in “technical details”, because it’s more intuitive.
Keyword focus: “asteroid orbital elements explained”, “semi major axis AU to km”, “planetary feature coordinates”.
How similarity suggestions work
If your name isn’t a perfect match:
- We normalize accents and case
- We compute similarity (Jaro–Winkler)
- We return the top 5 closest names
Related reading
- Orbit basics: /en/blog/orbit-in-3-minutes
- Close approaches: /en/blog/close-approaches-explained
Try the name search
Return to the search page.