Announcements

06/17/25 - On June 16, 2025 around noon PDT the NAIF server has undergone a mandatory SSL certificate update. The SSL new certificates deployed on the NAIF server are issued by a different Certificate Authority (CA).

While most web browsers and other HTTPS clients should experience no issues connecting to the NAIF server post update, some may receive the "certificate not trusted" error meaning that the client cannot verify the authenticity of the new certificates presented by the server.

This may be because the client system's CA certificates (the list of trusted Certificate Authorities) might be outdated and don't include the CA that issued the NAIF server's new certificate.

The solution in this case is to update the client system's CA certificates, typically by reinstalling the ca-certificates package using the client system's package manager.

05/01/25 - Driven by ever-tightening IT requirements, on May 1, 2025 NAIF stopped operation of the mailman-based NAIF-server-hosted mail lists spice_announce@naif.jpl.nasa.gov and spice_discussion@naif.jpl.nasa.gov that provided an uninterrupted service to the SPICE user community for over 22 years. These old lists were replaced by the new mail lists hosted by JPL institutional mail list services -- spice_announce@list.jpl.nasa.gov and spice_discussion@list.jpl.nasa.gov .

The new "spice_announce" list is a restricted list offering only the basic posting/delivery capability to the NAIF team to notify the community about important SPICE news.

The new "spice_discussion" list is a moderated list offering only the basic posting/delivery capability allowing the list members to send and reply to SPICE questions and discussion topics.

Neither of the new lists has advanced capabilities offered by the mailman system -- no digest, no web archive, etc. All current member subscriptions were transferred from the old lists to the new lists. If you would like your subscribed e-mail to be removed from the new lists, please contact the NAIF Manager directly.

03/25/25 - NAIF announces the deployment of the new WebGeocalc version 2.8.2 on both NAIF's WebGeocalc servers WGC (GUI only) and WGC2 (GUI and API). This new version extends the Input Time widget for scalar and time conversion calculations to allow specifying the time system for step durations, to add more time sampling units, to improve time stepping algorithms, and to update widget's terminology and descriptions. The new features available in the updated GUI Input Time widget have also been implemented in the API.

01/07/25 - The IERS announced there will NOT be a new leap second declared at midnight on June 30, 2025 (IERS Bulletin C 69). As a consequence, the current SPICE LSK, naif0012.tls, will remain current until at January 1, 2026.

10/26/24 - NAIF announces the availability of the N0067-based FORTRAN, IDL, MATLAB and Java/JNI toolkits for ARM (Apple silicon) Macs. These toolkits are available in the misc/toolkit_dev/N0067 directory on the NAIF server.

07/01/23 - To comply with the NASA cybersecurity policy, the anonymous FTP access to the NAIF server *WAS* terminated on July 1, 2023. Anybody who used anonymous FTP to download files from the NAIF server can switch to HTTPS to continue these downloads. Through HTTPS one can access all SPICE kernels and other SPICE materials available on the NAIF server starting at

For users using wget, the download help page shows wget options helpful for downloading just directories of interest without unnecessary extra HTML files.

12/29/22 - NAIF announces release of the new SPICE-Enhanced Cosmographia Version 4.2. This release is focused on a single major change -- upgrading the Python version used internally and in the program scripting interface from version 2 to 3, including providing scripting support on Windows environment where it was not previously available. For full details see the Cosmographia 4.2 Release Announcement and Installation Notes document.

12/27/22 - NAIF announces the release of updated generic PCKs based on "Report of the IAU Working Group on Cartographic Coordinates and Rotational Elements: 2015".

Due to extension of the Mars system rotation model in the 2015 Report that could not be accommodated by earlier SPICE Toolkits, this update consists of two files:

• pck00011.tpc, compatible with Toolkit version N0067 or later. Data in this file, other than orientation data for the Mars system, are usable by older Toolkits.

• pck00011_n0066.tpc, compatible with Toolkit version N0066 or earlier. Phobos orientation data in this file have been modified, and slightly degraded, to make them usable by older Toolkit versions.

For complete details about these new PCK files please refer to their internal comments.

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.

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.