Summer of 2008 SPICE Invention Challenge

SPK Summaries Tool

Here's your chance to wash away the boredom of a summer vacation, and at the same time become world famous!

An SPK file is the "bucket" within SPICE that holds trajectory/ephemeris information for spacecraft and/or natural bodies.

The SPICE system offers two tools for producing a summary of the contents (what objects) and coverage (time span covered) for an SPK file. But these tools produce only numeric output for a single file, and they can be used only on SPK files that have already been downloaded to the user's workstation. A client-side tool that would produce a graphical summary of one or more SPK files available on a remote server could be very useful, if carefully conceived and implemented.

We envision a tool, accessible through any standard web browser, that would help a SPICE user obtain a graphical comparison of SPK files found in a collection (e.g. all of the Cassini-Huygens spacecraft reconstruction SPKs) that could help the user decide which one(s) would be appropriate for a particular task. The tool would provide not only graphical comparisons of two or more SPKs, but could also display key meta-data about any one of the SPKs being considered.

We prepared a set of PDF charts that provides an idea of the screen displays a user might see in using this tool to search through a set of SPKs for just the right one. If you've got some time on your hands and are interested in looking into this "Summer of 2008 SPICE Invention Challenge," take a look at those charts and see what ideas you have.

If someone is able to come up with a truly useful and robust tool along these lines, NAIF would consider integrating it into the NAIF server for the benefit of all our customers. Perhaps other space agencies or other labs that deal with lots of SPICE SPK files would also wish to make use of such a capability.