Announcements

11/01/22 - NAIF with the ESA SPICE Service (ESS) announce that the next SPICE training in Europe is to be held on the week of the 17th to 21st of April 2023 at the European Space and Astronomy Center (ESAC/ESA), Villanueva de la Canada, Madrid, Spain. More details on the training and registration will be announced soon at the ESS SPICE Training site.

09/30/22 - NASA SMD is conducting a Data & Computing Architecture Study from now until April 2023 that aims to align NASA's approaches and capabilities for data and computing with the agency's Open Source Science efforts. NASA's archive user groups are among the main communities SMD is hoping to engage through this study. If you would like to be included in the study's email list, please contact Dr. Megan Ansdell at megan.c.ansdell@nasa.gov. Being on the email list will keep you informed on the series of workshops, talks, and discussions taking place over the next 7 months, which are open to all and will inform the final report.

09/01/22 - NAIF announces the next SPICE training class will take place October 25-27, 2022 at the DoubleTree by Hilton hotel, Monrovia, CA. The combination of the announcement letter and registration form are available at WS2022_announcement_R2.html. Registration is required, the sooner the better but no later than October 15th. Seating is limited and will be offered in the order in which firm registrations are received.

08/05/22 - NAIF offers a SPICE Newsletter.

08/05/22 - The IERS announced there will NOT be a new leap second declared at midnight on December 31, 2022 (IERS Bulletin C 64). As a consequence, the current SPICE LSK, naif0012.tls, will remain current until at least July 01, 2023.

04/13/22 - The NAIF team is seeking to hire a team member whose primary job will be the development of the next generation SPICE Toolkit (SPICE 2.0), implemented in C++11. The complete details about this position and instructions for applying are available at the JPL Careers website.

03/01/22 - NAIF announces the deployment of the new WebGeocalc version 2.3.0 on both NAIF's WebGeocalc servers WGC (GUI only) and WGC2 (GUI and API). This new version is based on the new SPICE Toolkit Version N0067 (supporting "Z"-terminated UTC strings on input), adds a new Illumination Angles Finder calculation, adds support for transmission aberration corrections in the Illumination Angles calculation, extends the Surface Point specification widget in both calculations, and has minor usability improvements across many calculations.

02/10/22 - NAIF announces release of the new SPICE-Enhanced Cosmographia Version 4.1. The primary new additions and updates to the program include support for loading shape data from SPICE DSK files, global font size controls, Find panel improvements, additional scripting functions, and upgrade to the SPICE Toolkit Version N0067. For full details see the Cosmographia 4.1 Release Announcement and Installation Notes document.

01/10/22 - NAIF announces release of the alpha-test Java Native Interface SPICE (JNISpice) Toolkits based on the new generic SPICE Toolkit N0067. The capabilities of these alpha-test JNISpice Tookits have been beefed up, bringing the supported functionality largely into line with that of CSPICE. For all new and revised capabilities of these Toolkits see the Whats's New in N0067 JNISpice document.

01/03/22 - NAIF announces release of the Version N67 Toolkits, with numerous additions and updates including new high level APIs (tangent point, target separation, azimuth and elevation coordinate conversions), support for two new frames types ("switch" and "product" frames), large numbers of new C, IDL, and MATLAB wrapper APIs, and substantial API header documentation improvements. For all new and revised N67 capabilities see the section "Version 67" of the Whats's New in SPICE Toolkit document.

12/15/20 - After 49 years Chuck Acton has retired from NASA/JPL and the PDS. Boris Semenov has been appointed as the new NAIF Group Supervisor and PDS NAIF Node Manager.

01/28/20 - 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.

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.