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.
12/16/19 - NASA HQ will shortly open a feedback form, eliciting comments from the space science community about the eight nodes comprising the Planetary Data System. Its availability will be announced here and via the "spice_announce" notification service. Some questions will be applicable to the PDS as a whole, and some questions will be specific to the NAIF Node. All feedback will be confidential. We encourage you to participate, providing us valuable feedback on how we can improve our services and data holdings.
12/11/19 - The on-line SPICE tutorials, available under the "Tutorials" link on the left-side navigation bar, have been updated.
10/30/19 - 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.
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.
