orbitr: A Tidy Physics Engine for Building and Visualizing Orbital Simulations

A lightweight, fully vectorized N-body physics engine built for the R ecosystem. Simulate and visualize complex orbital mechanics, celestial trajectories, and gravitational interactions using tidy data principles. Features multiple numerical integration methods, including the energy-conserving velocity Verlet algorithm (Verlet (1967) <doi:10.1103/PhysRev.159.98>), to ensure highly stable orbital propagation. Gravitational N-body methods follow Aarseth (2003, ISBN:0-521-43272-3).

Version: 0.2.0
Depends: R (≥ 4.1.0)
Imports: dplyr, ggplot2, Rcpp, tibble
LinkingTo: Rcpp
Suggests: plotly, gganimate, gifski, magick, knitr, rmarkdown, pkgdown, testthat (≥ 3.0.0)
Published: 2026-04-21
DOI: 10.32614/CRAN.package.orbitr
Author: Dave Rosenman [aut, cre]
Maintainer: Dave Rosenman <dave.rosenman.data at gmail.com>
BugReports: https://github.com/DRosenman/orbitr/issues
License: MIT + file LICENSE
URL: https://orbit-r.com/, https://github.com/DRosenman/orbitr
NeedsCompilation: yes
Materials: README, NEWS
CRAN checks: orbitr results

Documentation:

Reference manual: orbitr.html , orbitr.pdf
Vignettes: Building Two-Body Orbits From Scratch (source, R code)
Custom Visualization with ggplot2 and plotly (source, R code)
Examples (source, R code)
Further Reading (source)
Keplerian Orbital Elements (source, R code)
Built-In Physical Constants (source, R code)
3D Plotting (source, R code)
Quick Start Guide (source, R code)
Reference Frames (source, R code)
Roadmap (source)
The Physics (source, R code)
Unstable Orbits and the Three-Body Problem (source, R code)

Downloads:

Package source: orbitr_0.2.0.tar.gz
Windows binaries: r-devel: orbitr_0.2.0.zip, r-release: orbitr_0.2.0.zip, r-oldrel: orbitr_0.2.0.zip
macOS binaries: r-release (arm64): orbitr_0.2.0.tgz, r-oldrel (arm64): not available, r-release (x86_64): orbitr_0.2.0.tgz, r-oldrel (x86_64): orbitr_0.2.0.tgz

Linking:

Please use the canonical form https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=orbitr to link to this page.