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NAIF
SPICE

The Planetary Science Division's
Ancillary Information System

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's planetary exploration missions.

Announcements
(Most recent at top)

  • The Version N63 Toolkit is now available for all SPICE users. N63 provides the first official release of the "geometry finder" capability. Also, five new computing environments have been added. See the "whats.new" file available on each Toolkit download page for a summary of all additions, changes and fixes.

    A summary of the several minor bugs in N63—bugs unlikley to affect any users—is provided in the Known Bugs web page.


The current version of the SPICE Toolkit, Version N63, was released April 17, 2009. To see what's been added, fixed and changed relative to the previous release 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 downloaded.

Sign up to receive SPICE announcements at SPICE Announce.

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