Core experience
Story, Observatory, Atlas, Methods, Sources, and Accessibility work without signing in. Janus Observatory does not set analytics cookies. The Motion control stores only one preference—System, Reduced, or Full—in this browser's local storage.
Optional operational telemetry
A deployment may explicitly enable cookieless telemetry to measure Core Web Vitals, route-level use, chapter completion, instrument selection, comparison use, fallback mode, and source-link engagement. Records contain only bounded identifiers from a fixed allowlist plus device tier, reduced-motion state, and WebGL fallback state.
The telemetry endpoint rejects arbitrary text and query strings. It does not accept page prose, Research questions, provider reasoning, account identifiers, or persistent user IDs. Network addresses may be hashed ephemerally for abuse control and are not written into the event record.
Research Companion
The core site never depends on AI. When the Research preview is enabled, a question is sent to the Janus server so it can retrieve bounded evidence and produce a cited answer. Live provider calls remain separately gated; if enabled, the question and selected evidence are transmitted to the configured provider to generate the answer.
Questions are not stored by default. Operational traces may retain model and data versions, stage and allowlisted tool names, source IDs, token counts, latency, cache status, and error codes. Raw provider reasoning is never returned to the browser or intentionally logged.
External services and sources
The home-page spatial scene is rendered locally and does not request the original Spline host. It does not load a temporary poster before the Earth scene. Reduced motion preserves the copy and every scientific control.
Source and artifact links open other third-party sites with their own privacy practices. Janus Observatory does not embed rights-restricted artifacts merely to keep visitors on this site.