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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's planetary exploration missions.
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