06/18/20 - There remains great uncertainty about when NAIF would be allowed to conduct an in-person SPICE training class as has been done for many years. Not to mention when potential students would feel safe coming to such a class, and when student's sponsoring organizations would permit travel to a class. While we can accurately predict the orbits of planets for many years into the future, our COVID-19 crystal ball is totally opaque. It currently seems likely there would not be an opportunity for holding a live SPICE training class until a year from now. So we encourage those wishing to learn about SPICE to take advantage of our self training package that provides the same materials used in our live lessons.
03/25/20 - The SPICE training class scheduled for June 16-18 2020 at the ESAC facility near Madrid has been cancelled as a result of ESA's COVID-19 virus response. ESA anticipates re-scheduling such a class in FY21. Check the ESA SPICE website for details:
https://www.cosmos.esa.int/web/spice/training
03/14/20 - All JPL staff who are able to "telework" from home are now required to do so for some TBD amount of time. The NAIF Team is fairly well prepared to do this, but there could be some impacts. Of some concern is the possibility that the NAIF server or any of two other machines critical to our work could go down, and we would be either slow or unable to re-start them. We recommend anyone contemplating downloading data or other products from the NAIF server do so "now" to the extent possible.
3/11/20 - The WebGeocalc tool has been updated to Version 2.2.0, now offering new calculations and additions to existing calculations.
3/4/20 - NAIF will provide a talk and poster at the Cubesat Developers Workshop in San Louis Obispo on May 4 - 6. This conference has been cancelled. NAIF will provide a talk and staff a "booth" at the Interplanetary SmallSat Conference at Caltech on May 11,12. This conference has been turned into a virtual meeting, with details TBD.
1/28/20 - While access to SPICE data on the NAIF server via anonymous ftp remains possible as of now, it seems more-and-more likely that that protocol will be disallowed in the future. Customers using ftp should consider changing to another means of data access such as https, wget or curl. Look here for a GSFC webpage providing useful information on this topic.
1/15/20 - Look here for announcements about upcoming SPICE training opportunities.
1/7/20 - The International Earth Rotation Service (IERS) has announced there will NOT be a new leap second added at the end of June 2020. As a consequence, the current SPICE leapseconds kernels, named naif0012.tls for Unix and OSX, and naif0012.tls.pc for Windows, will remain in effect until at least January 01, 2021.
12/11/19 - The on-line SPICE tutorials, available under the "Tutorials" link on the left-side navigation bar, have been updated.
10/01/18 - New NASA cybersecurity policy has required that NAIF immediately make some changes to some of its publicly available web pages. In particular we
were required to add a NASA-mandated header and footer to every web page, even to pages that show directory listings for project and PDS SPICE
data directories. We believe this should have minimal or no effect on our users, but cannot be certain of this. We urge users of the NAIF server to quickly check any automated access to NAIF’s pages.
Some NAIF/SPICE users make use of the Unix wget command to obtain new mission data on a regular basis. You might have to modify your wget
command to reject all additional HTML files that might appear due to this change (using the "--reject 'index.html*'" option). CURL and other data transfer commands may need equivalent changes.
6/1/17 - Due to equipment failure, NAIF will not be able to provide future Toolkits (version N67 and beyond) for the Sun/Intel Solaris environments.
5/11/17 - Regarding CubeSat and Similar Missions
Directions from NASA HQ stipulate that any cubesat or similar mission that would want support from the NAIF Group in deploying and operating SPICE production capabilities, or in providing consultation to SPICE operators or scientists using SPICE, must be paid for by the project, just as is done for larger projects.
Projects are free to implement and operate SPICE on their own without help from NAIF. In this case you'll need people experienced in producing and validating SPICE kernels, and in monitoring the SPICE production pipeline for SPK, CK and SCLK kernels.
Selecting an Ancillary Data System (PDF) provides some commentary that could be useful.
4/10/17 - NAIF announces release of the Version N66 Toolkits, with the first formal inclusion of the tesselated plate portion of the Digital Shape Kernel (DSK) as the principle addition. Check out the DSK tutorial for details.
