Download Help

Unless you have specific reason not to, you should download the entire SPICE archive for whichever project you are working on.

The archived SPICE data sets exist on the NAIF server fully expanded into all the normal directories—not in a tar or zip container. This is because some of those archived data sets are too large to place in a container. As a consequence, you cannot simply click on a tar or zip file name in your browser to download a SPICE archive. There exist a number of utilities for downloading a collection of files—see below.

wget is a Gnu utility convenient for downloading one or a collection of files from an FTP server such as NAIF. wget normally comes already installed on unix and linux systems, and it can be downloaded for Windows platforms and Macs. Once installed (and perhaps added to your path, for convenience) you can use wget to download the entire SPICE archive for the project of interest.

wget has lots of capability, and thus lots of options. NAIF suggests you try using it as follows. First, change directory on your computer to the location where you would like the SPICE data set copied. Then execute wget as follows:

 wget -m -nH --cut-dirs=5 -e robots=off --trust-server-names -R 'index.html*' -I '(insert the directory name from the URL of the "Volume FTP Link" for the SPICE data set here)' -nv (insert the URL of the "Volume FTP Link" for the SPICE data set here)

For example, to download the Deep Impact SPICE archive you would execute:

 wget -m -nH --cut-dirs=5 -e robots=off --trust-server-names -R 'index.html*' -I 'pub/naif/pds/data/di-c-spice-6-v1.0/disp_1000/' -nv http://naif.jpl.nasa.gov/pub/naif/pds/data/di-c-spice-6-v1.0/disp_1000/

Once the download has completed the directory named "disp_1000" will be found at your computer's current location, with the SPICE dataset expanded below that.

Other download tools may also be used.

CAUTION: for the largest SPICE data sets such as Cassini, Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, and especially Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, the download may take many hours, especially if your Internet connection is on the slow side.