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SPICE The NASA Planetary Science Division's
Ancillary Information System
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The Navigation and Ancillary Information Facility (NAIF) provides NASA planetary flight projects
and NASA funded professional planetary researchers an information system named
"SPICE" to assist scientists in planning and interpreting scientific observations from space-based
instruments. SPICE is also widely used in engineering tasks associated with planetary missions.
SPICE is focused on solar system geometry (pdf).
The SPICE system includes a large suite of software, mostly in the form of subroutines, that
customers incorporate in their own application programs to read SPICE files and to compute derived
observation geometry, such as altitude, lattitude/longitude, and lighting angles.
SPICE data and software may be used within many popular computing environments.
The software is offered in FORTRAN, C, IDL® and MATLAB®.
NAIF serves as the "Navigation Node" of NASA's Planetary Data System,
archiving and providing the science community access to SPICE data from NASA missions.
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Announcements
(Most recent at top)
- The time for release of the alpha-test version of the new "geometry finder" subsystem is getting near.
(This subsystem is outlined in the NAIF tutorial named "45_event_finding_preview.") Anyone interested in
trying out this new software that hasn't already sent an email expressing interest in being notified about
release of the software is invited to send a notice of interest to the NAIF manager. Please include which of
the four languages NAIF supports that you would use.
- Consider contributing some of your expertise to the global SPICE user community: look at the
Summer of 2008 SPICE Invention Challenge.
- Additions to the "Data" webpages should make understanding the NAIF server data holdings and finding
SPICE data somewhat easier than in the past. (As always, let us know if you have problems understanding what
is available or finding what you need. Suggestions for improvement are welcome.)
- A SPICE training class is now confirmed for October 28-31, 2008.
See the notice for more information and registration form.
Please register by September 19th if planning to attend.
- The International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service (IERS) has announced there will
be a new leap second effective January 1, 2009. NAIF has created new versions of the leapseconds kernel
(LSK) to accommodate this new leap second: naif0009.tls for Unix, Linux and OSX, and naif0009.tls.pc for Windows. These new leapseconds kernels are available from the
Generic_kernels area of the NAIF server.
The new LSK appropriate for your platform may be downloaded and used to replace the naif0008 LSK at
your convenience, but no later than December 31, 2008. Using the new LSK will NOT affect time conversions involving dates prior to Jan 1, 2009, but will affect time conversions involving dates after Jan 1, 2009.
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The current version of the SPICE Toolkit, Version N62, was released
March 5, 2008. To see what's been added, fixed and changed read the "whats.new" available on this website under the Toolkit link for the
language of interest to you, or see this same file in a Toolkit package you have download.
Sign up to receive SPICE announcements at
SPICE Announce.
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